Towards native higher-order remote procedure calls

We present a new abstract machine, called DCESH, which models the execution of higher-order programs running in distributed architectures. DCESH implements a native general remote higher-order function call across node boundaries. It is a modernised version of SECD enriched with specialised communication features required for implementing the remote procedure call mechanism. The key correctness result is that the termination behaviour of the remote procedure call is indistinguishable (bisimilar) to that of a local call. The correctness proofs and the requisite definitions for DCESH and other related abstract machines are formalised using Agda. We also formalise a generic transactional mechanism for transparently handling failure in DCESHs.

We use the DCESH as a target architecture for compiling a conventional call-by-value functional language ("Floskel") which can be annotated with node information. Conventional benchmarks show that the single-node performance of Floskel is comparable to that of OCaml, a semantically similar language, and that distribution overheads are not excessive.