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| Axum | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | Microsoft |
| First appeared | May 8, 2009 |
| Stable release | Community Technology Preview / May 8, 2009 (2009-05-08) |
| Platform | x86,x86-64 andItanium |
| OS | Windows XP Windows Server 2003 Windows Vista Windows Server 2008 Windows 7 |
| License | Closed source |
| Website | Axum at DevLabs |
Axum (previously codenamedMaestro) is adomain-specificconcurrentprogramming language, based on theActor model, that was under active development byMicrosoft[1] between 2009 and 2011.[2] It is anobject-oriented language based on the.NETCommon Language Runtime using aC-like syntax which, being a domain-specific language, is intended for development of portions of a software application that is well-suited to concurrency. But it contains enough general-purpose constructs that one need not switch to a general-purpose programming language (likeC#) for the sequential parts of the concurrent components.[1]
The main idiom of programming in Axum is anAgent (or anActor), which is an isolated entity that executes in parallel with other Agents.[3] In Axum parlance, this is referred to as the agents executing in separateisolation domains;[3] objects instantiated within a domain cannot be directly accessed from another.[4] Agents are loosely coupled (i.e., the number of dependencies between agents is minimal) and do not share resources like memory (unlike theshared memory model ofC# and similar languages); instead amessage passing model is used.[3] To co-ordinate agents or having an agent request the resources of another, an explicit message must be sent to the agent. Axum providesChannels to facilitate this.
Channels can be regarded as a directional pathway to communicate between agent instances. The member functions of aChannel object, after it has been bound to an agent instance, can be used to communicate with it. AChannel contains input and outputports, which arequeues which are used to send data to an agent or receive data from one. To co-ordinate the communication between agents, Axum allows each channel to have a user-definedprotocol for communication. The protocol is defined as astate machine.[5] The data sent over a channel can be optionally restricted to conform to a certain pre-definedschema. The compiler and runtime will enforce the conformance with the schema.[6] Under the hood, aschema is translated into aserializable .NETclass that contains only properties and side effect-free methods.[7]
The Axum project reached the state of a prototype with workingMicrosoft Visual Studio integration.[8] Microsoft had made aCTP of Axum available to the public,[9] but this has since been removed.Although Microsoft decided not to turn Axum into a project,[2] some of the ideas behind Axum are used inTPL Dataflow in .Net 4.5.
