Comilation of a Highly Parallel Actor-Based Language

Hal incorporates a number of high-level language constructs such as the incremental specialization of synchronization constraints to maintain the consistency of actors at run-time, the inheritance of both code and synchronization constraints, and limited reeective capabilities to customize the system with respect to fault tolerance. This paper describes some issues in compiling Hal, and, in particular, three source level transformations used by the compiler for Hal. Two of the transformations translate RPC-style message sending into asynchronous message sending. The third transformation performs code motion to optimize the implementation of replacement behavior. This optimization results in the reduction of object code size as well as execution time.