Year 1999

Christian Queinnec. Marshaling/unmarshaling as a compilation/interpretation process. In Second Merged Symposium IPPS/SPDP 1999 - 13th International Parallel Processing Symposium & 10th Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, pages 616-621, San-Juan (Puerto-Rico, USA), April 1999. IEEE. See detailed report 21.

Abstract:

Marshaling is the process through which structured values are serialized into a stream of bytes; unmarshaling converts this stream of bytes back to structured values. Most often, for a given data structure, the marshaler and the unmarshaler are tightly related pieces of code that are synthesized conjunctly. This paper proposes a new point of view: the unmarshaler is considered as a byte-code interpreter evaluating a stream of bytes considered as a program i.e., a sequence of commands interspersed with quoted raw data. This program is an expression of the marshaling language. From that point of view, the marshaler logically appears as a compiler translating values into expressions of the marshaling language.

[See also]

Luc Moreau, Christian Queinnec, Daniel Ribbens, and Manuel Serrano. Recueil de petits problèmes en Scheme. Scopos. Springer-Verlag, 1999. [Cover page] [See also]

Christian Queinnec and Luc Moreau. Graceful disconnection. In Takayasu Ito and Taiichi Yuasa, editors, Parallel and Distributed Computing for Symbolic and Irregular Applications - PDCSIA'99, pages 242-252, Tohoku University, Sendai (Japan), July 1999. World Scientific Publishing.

Abstract:

A distributed object system allows objects to be communicated from site to site disregarding their physical locations. Communicating objects often leaves a trail homing to the site that owns the original object. To shortcut these trails reduces the number of ``zombies'' i.e., sites that are part of the trail but do not need the object for themselves. This paper proposes an algorithm that allows a site to disconnect gracefully that is, without global network synchronization and therefore quickly. This algorithm focuses on the proper treatment of zombies.