An actor-based programming language for developing highly-reliable asynchronous software, such as web-services and distributed systems.
- Enables the development of efficient asynchronous applications using an event-driven, actor-based programming model. Because all the asynchrony is explicitly exposed at specific communication points in a P# program, the user does not need to explicitly create and manage tasks; the P# runtime is instead responsible for handling all the underlying concurrency, allowing the developer to focus on application logic.
- Allows the environment to be modeled via language constructs. The compiler can then automatically substitute real code with modeled, and systematically test the compiled executable to discover bugs (such as assertion failures and uncaught exceptions).
- Provides strong data race freedom guarantees. The compiler is able to perform a scalable static data race analysis on the source code that can detect all potential data races in a program (based on certain assumptions, such as no use of non-P# threading or reflection).
- Fully interoperates with C#: the developer can write any C# code inside a P# program. P# is basically an extension of C#, build on top of the Roslyn and .NET frameworks, which not only makes P# easy to learn comparing with a completely new language, but also allows easy integration with existing code.
- Get Visual Studio 2015 Preview (required for Microsoft Roslyn).
- Clone this project and compile using VS2015.
Optional: Get the Visual Studio 2015 SDK to be able to compile the P# visual studio extension (syntax highlighting).
A good way to start is by reading the manual.
The P# compiler can be used to parse a program, statically analyse it for data races and finally compile it to an executable. To invoke the compiler use the following command:
.\PSharpCompiler.exe /s:${SOLUTION_PATH}\${SOLUTION_NAME}.sln
Where ${SOLUTION_PATH} is the path to your P# solution and ${SOLUTION_NAME} is the name of your P# solution.
To specify an output path destination use the option /o:${OUTPUT\_PATH}.
To compile only a specific project in the solution use the option /p:${PROJECT_NAME}.
To see various available command line options use the option /?.
To statically analyze the program for data races use the option /analyze.
To systematically test the program for bugs (i.e. assertion failures and exceptions) use the option /test. You can optionally give the number of testing iterations to perform using /i:value.
- Asynchronous Programming, Analysis and Testing with State Machines. Pantazis Deligiannis, Alastair F. Donaldson, Jeroen Ketema, Akash Lal and Paul Thomson. In the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2015.