Thread-safe reactive programming

Abstract

The execution of an application written in a reactive language involves transfer of data and control flow between imperative and reactive abstractions at well-defined points. In a multi-threaded environment, multiple such interactions may execute concurrently, potentially causing data races and event ordering ambiguities. Existing RP languages either disable multi-threading or handle it at the cost of reducing expressiveness or weakening consistency. This paper proposes a model for thread-safe reactive programming (RP) that ensures abort-free strict serializability under concurrency while sacrificing neither expressiveness nor consistency. We also propose an architecture for integrating a corresponding scheduler into the RP language runtime, such that thread-safety is provided "out-of-the-box" to the applications. We show the feasibility of our proposal by providing and evaluating a ready-to-use implementation integrated into the REScala programming language. The scheduling algorithm is formally proven correct. A thorough empirical evaluation shows that reactive applications build on top of it scale with multiple threads, while the scheduler incurs acceptable performance overhead in a single-threaded configuration. The scalability enabled by our scheduler is roughly on-par with that of hand-crafted application-specific locking and better than the scalability enabled by a scheduler using an off-the-shelf software transactional memory library.