Threads for the Programmer, Events for the Machine

Major motes operating systems like TinyOS or Contiki rely on an event-driven programming paradigm. While the use of events allows for limiting memory usage on resource-constrained motes, it may also hamper the development and debugging of applications, especially as their complexity increases [Dunkels2006]. Several authors also investigated the possibility of introducing threads to mote programming [...]

Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects

Worlds is “a language construct that reifies the notion of program state, and enables programmers to control the scope of side effects.” Alessandro Warth investigaged this idea together with Alan Kay in a paper entitled Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects. Chapter 4 of Warth’s dissertation Experimenting with Programming Languages obsoletes this paper. Worlds/JS [...]