Join-calculus

The join-calculus is a process calculus developed at INRIA. The join-calculus was developed to provide a formal basis for the design of distributed programming languages, and therefore intentionally avoids communications constructs found in other process calculi, such as rendezvous communications, which are difficult to implement in a distributed setting [cite paper | author=Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier | title=The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus | date = 1995 | url=http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fournet95reflexive.html, pg. 1] . Despite this limitation, the join-calculus is equally as expressive as the full $pi$-calculus. Encodings of the $pi$-calculus in the join-calculus, and vice-versa, have been demonstrated [cite paper | author=Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier | title=The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus | date = 1995 | url=http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fournet95reflexive.html, pg. 2] .

The join-calculus is a member of the $pi$-calculus family of process calculi, and can be considered, at its core, an asynchronous $pi$-calculus with several strong restrictions [cite paper | author=Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier | title=The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus | date = 1995 | url=http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fournet95reflexive.html, pg. 19] :
*Scope restriction, reception, and replicated reception are syntactically merged into a single construct, the "definition";
*Communication occurs only on defined names;
*For every defined name there is exactly one replicated reception.However, as a language for programming, the join-calculus offers at least one convenience over the $pi$-calculus — namely the use of "multi-way join patterns", the ability to match against messages from multiple channels simultaneously.

Languages based on the join-calculus

The join-calculus programming language is based on the join-calculus process calculus. It is implemented as an interpreter written in OCaml, and supports statically typed distributed programming, transparent remote communication, agent-based mobility, and failure-detection [cite paper | author=Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier | title=The Join Calculus: A Language for Distributed Mobile Programming | date = 2000 | url=http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/670457.html] .

JoCaml is a version of OCaml extended with join-calculus primitives.

Polyphonic C# and its successor Cω extend C#. MC# extends Polyphonic C# and also devoted to .NET.
Join Java extends Java.

The [http://channel.sourceforge.net/ Boost.Join] library is an implementation in C++.

References

External links

* INRIA, [http://moscova.inria.fr/join/index.shtml Join Calculus homepage]