Join-calculus

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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 equally 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.

[edit] Languages based on the join-calculus

The join-calculus programming language is based on the join-calculus process calculus. It is implemented as an interpreter written in OCaml, and supports statically typed distributed programming, transparent remote communication, agent-based mobility, and failure-detection^[4].

JoCaml is a version of OCaml extended with join-calculus primitives.

Polyphonic C# and its successor Cω extend C#. MC# extends Polyphonic C# and also devoted to .NET. Join Java extends Java.

The Boost.Join library is an implementation in C++.