Abstract

In a wide-area distributed system it is often impractical to synchronise software updates, so one must deal with many coexisting versions. This talk will be about static typing support for modular wide-area programming, modelling separate compilation/linking and execution of programs that interact along typed channels. Interaction may involve communication of values of abstract types, so developers need fine-grain versioning control of these types to support interoperation of old and new code.

This is all made precise in terms of a second-class module system with singleton kinds, with a novel operational semantics for separate compilation/linking and execution.

Paper available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/pes20/index.html#VERSIONS