Ambient Transactors

Extensions to the actor model have been proposed to ease
the development of mobile ad hoc applications. However,
programming in the actor model is still dicult as it does
not provide abstractions to synchronously coordinate mul-
tiple actors. Thus, when programmers want to coordinate
two or more actors they have to do it by hand. Additionally,
programmers need to write failure recovery code for failures
caused by the concurrent access to the actors they are us-
ing. Coding this manually is error prone and might even
be not feasible. We propose a language abstraction based
on software transactional memory to coordinate actors. We
show that the integration of software transactional memory
with the actor model makes writing failure recovery code su-
per
uous. Moreover, we show that our system even handles
those cases where manually writing the failure recovery code
is not feasible.