Flexible IDL compilation for complex communication patterns

摘要

Distributed applications are complex by nature, so it is essen- tial that there be effective software development tools to aid in the construction of these programs. Commonplace ``mid- dleware'' tools, however, often impose a tradeoff between programmer productivity and application performance. For instance, many CORBA IDL compilers generate code that is too slow for high-performance systems. More importantly, these compilers provide inadequate support for sophisticated patterns of communication. We believe that these problems can be overcome, thus making IDL compilers and similar middleware tools useful for a broader range of systems. To this end we have implemented Flick, a flexible and op- timizing IDL compiler, and are using it to produce special- ized high-performance code for complex distributed applica- tions. Flick can produce specially ``decomposed'' stubs that encapsulate different aspects of communication in separate functions, thus providing application programmers with fine- grain control over all messages. The design of our decom- posed stubs was inspired by the requirements of a particu- lar distributed application called Khazana, and in this paper we describe our experience to date in refitting Khazana with Flick-generated stubs. We believe that the special IDL com- pilation techniques developed for Khazana will be useful in other applications with similar communication requirements.