Abstract

This paper presents an extension to Java's type system that systematically addresses the issues of data sharing, revocation, thread control, and resource control. Multiple tasks running in a single virtual machines share data using special remote pointers, which have different types from local pointers. The distinction between local and remote pointers allows the Java run-time system to mediate the communication between tasks without slowing down operations on ordinary pointers. The extensions to Java are implemented by a system called Luna, based on the Guavac and Marmot compilers, extended with special optimizations to support both fast inter-task communication and dynamic access control. The paper describes two applications written in Luna: a simple extensible web server, and an extension of the Squid web cache to support dynamic content generation.

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