Tortuga
Abstract
Tortuga is a functionally-oriented concurrent programming language. The runtime is a Rust program to provide performance and memory safety; the language compiles to WebAssembly. Using WebAssembly allows developers to utilize their favorite programming language to write actors for the runtime. Targeting WebAssembly as the compilation architecture allows us to test the runtime itself without a dependency on the programming language, so the two can be developed independently.
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Glossary
Modules
Tortuga programs are comprised of modules, functions, and processes. Each module may contain multiple definitions of functions and processes.
Function
A block of logic that is exposed by a module for consumption by other modules. Functions are the building blocks of libraries. Functions are side-effect free.
Process
A computational entity that can:
- Send a finite number of messages to other actors.
- Create a finite number of new processes.
- Designate the behavior to be used for the next message it receives.
Behavior
A set of logical instructions (i.e., messages sent to processes, function invocations) executed in the context of a process for a specific message. Behaviors are different from functions in that they may have side-effects. The only side effect a behavior may invoke directly is sending a message. All other side-effects: writing to a file, reading bytes from a network interface, starting a new process, etc.
Supervision
Processes may form a supervision tree. The system provides a root process for all supervision trees. The root has children for system processes and user processes. When an process creates a new child process, the creator becomes the supervisor of the created. On failure to process a message, the system queries the supervisor to determine the appropriate action (e.g., restart the process and re-process the message, discard the message, etc.).
Host
The WebAssembly runtime that instantiates guests for each actor continuation and routes messages.
Guest
The guest is an instance of a WebAssembly module with access to the Application Programming Language (API) of the Tortuga runtime. A guest maps to a continuation of an actor.
Design
Compiler
- Scanner (i.e., Lexer)
- Parser
- Transformer
- Emitter
WebAssembly (WASM-AST)
Crate modeling the WebAssembly specification.
Runtime
Defines the interface between the guest and host. Relied upon by the system to run instances.
Grammar
The grammar for tortuga is defined using the following rules:
expression -> comparison;
comparison -> term ( ( "<" | ">" | "=" | "<" ">" | "<" "=" | ">" "=" | "<" "=" ">" ) term )*;
term -> factor ( ( "+" | "-" ) factor )*;
factor -> primary ( ( "*" | "/" ) primary )*;
primary -> ( "+" | "-" )? NUMBER | TEXT_REFERENCE | "(" expression ")";
Usage
To run the system locally, perform the following steps:
-
Clone the repository to your local machine.
-
Run
cargo build. -
Build the examples as described in the Examples section.
-
Run
cargo run start. -
Run
cargo run -- deploy --intent examples/target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/ping.wasm -
Run
cargo run -- deploy --intent examples/target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/pong.wasm -
In the terminal that is running the System, you should see the "Ping!" and "Pong!" messages flowing back and forth.
Endianness
While the system sends all numbers in network byte order (i.e., big endian), WebAssembly uses little-endian for its numbers. Therefore, the system will handle mapping the integers between the types of endianness. See https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-newman-network-byte-order-01
Examples
Rust
Some examples are Rust-based Tortuga actors that compile to WASM. To build the examples, change to the examples workspace directory. Then, run cargo build --release. Built examples can be found in: examples/target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/*.wasm.
Benchmarks
Use cargo bench to execute the benchmarks on a GitHub CodeSpace using the latest commit in the main branch.
Emitting Binary
empty time: [71.367 ns 72.067 ns 72.937 ns]
Found 18 outliers among 100 measurements (18.00%)
4 (4.00%) high mild
14 (14.00%) high severe
singular time: [563.37 ns 567.78 ns 573.22 ns]
Found 11 outliers among 100 measurements (11.00%)
2 (2.00%) high mild
9 (9.00%) high severe
Install
To install, run cargo install tortuga.