Abstract
Many systems use ad hoc collections of files and directories to store persistent data. For consumers of this data, the process of properly parsing, using, and updating these filestores using conventional APIs is cumbersome and error-prone. Making matters worse, most filestores are too big to fit in memory, so applications must process the data incrementally while managing concurrent accesses by multiple users. This paper presents Transactional Forest (TxForest), which builds on earlier work on Forest to provide a simpler, more powerful API for managing filestores, including a mechanism for managing concurrent accesses using serializable transactions. Under the hood, TxForest implements an optimistic concurrency control scheme using Huet’s zippers to track the data associated with filestores. We formalize TxForest in a core calculus, develop a proof of serializability, and describe our OCaml prototype, which we have used to build several practical applications.
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Notes
- 1.
By integrating with PADS [6], we could go a step further and specify the contents of the file as well—i.e. a single line containing an integer.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the anonymous APLAS reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Our work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-1413972 and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
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DiLorenzo, J., Mancini, K., Fisher, K., Foster, N. (2019). TxForest: A DSL for Concurrent Filestores. In: Lin, A. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11893. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_17
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