Mapping channel-based message passing to mailbox message passing in Erlang

Abstract

In this work we build a compiler to run π-calculus code. We see that the current systems that run π-calculus have some problem with them, so our compiler is aimed to resolve the problems that exist in current systems. The compiler works by translating π-calculus code to Erlang code. We chose Erlang because it is concurrency-oriented languages and use message passing for communication like the π-calculus so they have some similarities. However π-calculus uses channel-based message passing while Erlang uses mailbox message passing which is a major difference. It turns out that there is not obvious way to perform this translation. To perform this translation we created different mappings from channel-based to mailbox message passing, with the aim of comparing them. We have designed and implemented three mappings, which were chosen to be very different from each other. Eventually, we tested our mapping and we tested them for correctness, visibility, efficiency and elegance. For correctness we only showed that mappings are correct with respect to specific examples. Visibility is important to show that the compiler actually translates and not evaluate the code. As regards efficiency, we have shown that no mapping is absolutely better than the others, but it rather depends on the type of code on which they are used. As regards elegance we have shown that one is better in terms of compactness while another is better in understandability.