Join-calculus

The join-calculus is a process calculus developed at INRIA. The join-calculus was developed to provide a formal basis for the design of distributed programming languages, and therefore intentionally avoids communications constructs found in other process calculi, such as rendezvous communications, which are difficult to implement in a distributed setting.[1] Despite this limitation, the join-calculus is as expressive as the full π-calculus. Encodings of the π-calculus in the join-calculus, and vice versa, have been demonstrated.[2]

The join-calculus is a member of the π-calculus family of process calculi, and can be considered, at its core, an asynchronous π-calculus with several strong restrictions:[3]

  • Scope restriction, reception, and replicated reception are syntactically merged into a single construct, the definition;
  • Communication occurs only on defined names;
  • For every defined name there is exactly one replicated reception.

However, as a language for programming, the join-calculus offers at least one convenience over the π-calculus — namely the use of multi-way join patterns, the ability to match against messages from multiple channels simultaneously.[4]

  1. ^ Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier (1995). "The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help), pg. 1
  2. ^ Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier (1995). "The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help), pg. 2
  3. ^ Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier (1995). "The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help), pg. 19
  4. ^ Petricek, Tomas. "TryJoinads (IV.) - Concurrency using join calculus". tomasp.net. Retrieved 2023-01-24.