Volta: Developing Distributed Applications by Recompiling

Mainstream languages and tools are tailored for sequential, nondistributed applications, with support for distributed computing provided only in library APIs. Such programming environments force developers to make decisions early in the application life cycle about where the code should run, structuring the entire application around partitioning decisions. Performance measurement might reveal that the original partitioning was wrong, but redistributing the application is expensive because redistributing is restructuring. This article describes a new kind of tool suite that recompiles executables into a distributed form on the basis of declarative user annotations, inserting most of the necessary remoting and synchronization boilerplate code and facilitating post hoc instrumentation to drive quantitative redistribution. Because the tools operate on the intermediate language CIL (.NET common intermediate language), they´re compatible with a wide variety of .NET programming languages and eventual execution environments, even those that don´t support CIL directly, such as JavaScript.