Inheritance of synchronization and recovery properties in Avalon/C++

The authors describe their experience adapting inheritance mechanisms to a new application domain, reliable distributed systems. They give an overview of Avalon/C++, a programming language under development that allows programmers to ´customize´ the synchronization and fault-tolerance properties of data types by letting them inherit properties such as serializability and crash recovery from a library of basic types. The authors first describe the transaction model used to organize distributed computations and some relevant features of C++, and give an overview of the Avalon/C++ base hierarchy. They then describe in more detail each of the hierarchy´s classes and some restrictions on their use that must be obeyed to preserve their semantic intent. An extended example illustrates a directory-type implementation that uses all three of the base classes. Related work is discussed.<>