Abstract
This thesis describes Kilim, a framework that employs a combination of techniques to help create robust, massively concurrent
systems in mainstream languages such as Java: (i) ultra-lightweight, cooperatively-scheduled threads (actors), (ii) a message-passing framework (no shared memory, no locks) and (iii) isolation-aware messaging. Isolation is achieved by controlling the shape and ownership of mutable messages – they must not have internal aliases and can only be owned by a single actor at a time. We demonstrate a static analysis built around isolation type qualiï¬ers to enforce these constraints.
Kilim comfortably scales to handle hundreds of thousands of actors and messages on modest hardware. It is fast as well – task-switching
is 1000x faster than Java threads and 60x faster than other lightweight tasking frameworks, and message-passing is 3x faster than Erlang (currently the gold standard for concurrency-oriented programming).
