Article

Mace: language support for building distributed systems

Authors:

Charles Edwin Killian,

James W. Anderson,

Amin M. VahdatAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '07: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 179 - 188

https://doi.org/10.1145/1250734.1250755

Published: 10 June 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Building distributed systems is particularly difficult because of the asynchronous, heterogeneous, and failure-prone environment where these systemsmust run. Tools for building distributed systems must strike a compromise between reducing programmer effort and increasing system efficiency. We present Mace, a C++ language extension and source-to-source compiler that translates a concise but expressive distributed system specification into a C++ implementation. Mace overcomes the limitations of low-level languages by providing a unified framework for networking and event handling, and the limitations of high-level languages by allowing programmers to write program components in a controlled and structured manner in C++. By imposing structure and restrictions on how applications can be written, Mace supports debugging at a higher level, including support for efficient model checking and causal-path debugging. Because Mace programs compile to C++, programmers can use existing C++ tools, including optimizers, profilers, and debuggers to analyze their systems.

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Index Terms

Mace: language support for building distributed systems
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Context specific languages
      1. Specialized application languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '07: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2007

508 pages

ISBN:9781595936332

DOI:10.1145/1250734

General Chair:
Jeanne Ferrante
University of California, San Diego, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathryn S. McKinley
University of Texas at Austin, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 6
Proceedings of the 2007 PLDI conference
June 2007
491 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1273442
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 June 2007

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PLDI '07: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 10 - 13, 2007

California, San Diego, USA

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3671016.3671382
Gulcan ENeto JOzkan BChristakis MPradel M(2024)Generalized Concurrency Testing Tool for Distributed SystemsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3685309(1861-1865)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
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Li JZhang YLu SGunawi HGu XHuang FLi D(2023)Performance Bug Analysis and Detection for Distributed Storage and Computing SystemsACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/358028119:3(1-33)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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