Programming Languages for Distributed Computing Systems

摘要

The author begins by giving the view of what a distributed system is, illustrating it with examples to avoid confusion on the important and controversial point. Then the author describes the three main characteristics that distinguish distributed programming languages from ordinary sequential languages, namely, how they deal with parallelism, communication, and partial failures. Finally, the author discusses 15 representative distributed languages to give the flavor of each. These examples include languages based on message passing, rendezvous, remote procedure call, objects, and atomic transactions, as well as functional languages, logic languages, and distributed data structure languages. The paper concludes with a comprehensive bibliography listing over 200 papers on nearly 100 distributed programming languages.