Choreographic Programming
In short, choreographic programming is a programming paradigm in which one programs a distributed system from a global viewpoint.
A choreographic program intuitively specifies the control flow of the distributed system as a whole. That is it specifies the communications performed by the participating processes in the system and the local computations they perform.
A compiler can automatically transform a choreographic program into an executable implementation for each role. This compilation procedure is known as projection and the generated implementations as projections. Running the projections concurrently will yield the global behavior described by the choreography.
Choreographic programs often come with a syntactic primitive for communication between processes.
For example on the form Alice -> Bob value, which reads “Alice sends value to Bob”.
The connection between send and receive makes it impossible to describe send / receive mismatches or even deadlocks.
Terms
A list of terms related to choreographic programming.
- Role: A role denotes an actor in a choreographic program, at runtime the role becomes a process.
- Knowledge of Choice is a problem that arises when one role computes a conditional (eg. an
ifstatement), and another role needs to act differently based on the choice.
References
- The book Introduction to Choreographies gives a more formal introduction to choreographic programming.