International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'03)
A Java Dialect Free of Data Races and without Annotations
Nice, France
April 22-April 26
ISBN: 0-7695-1926-1
We introduce a dialect of Java, JShield, for concurrent object oriented programming, whose primary design goal is robustness. JShield preserves the Java syntax and the semantics of sequential Java programs. It modifies the semantics of concurrent programs to completely avoid data races without relying on the programmer ability, and without requiring special annotations. This is achieved by combining Hoare?s monitors with remote method invocations of Java to ensure the proper request of a lock before manipulating shared data. We show that this can be done with a reasonable overhead in execution time compared to Java.