Communication, scheduling, and resource management in SINA

In this article we present the object-oriented constructs for communication and concurrent programming in the SINA programming language. The object encapsulation mechanism of SINA allows implementations of hierarchically structured resource management systems and alleviates some of the problems that arise in using nested monitor structures [13,28,31]. SINA supports capability-based communication between objects using object pointers. This permits building systems in which the communication topology can change dynamically. Using these constructs we present object-oriented solutions to various problems in interprocess communication, scheduling, and resource management. A number of examples of such problems have been implemented and tested using our SINA system on the SUN 3 workstations.