Experience with Acore: Implementing GHC with Actors

Abstract

This paper presents a concurrent interpreter for a general-purpose concurrent logic programming language, Guarded Horn Clauses (GHC). Unlike typical implementations of GHC in logic programming languages, the interpreter is implemented in the Actor language Acore. The primary motivation for this work was to probe the strengths and weaknesses of Acore as a platform for developing sophisticated programs. The GHC interpreter provided a rich testbed for exploring Actor programming methodology. The interpreter is a pedagogical investigation of the mapping of GHC constructs onto the Actor model. Since we opted for simplicity over optimization, the interpreter is somewhat inefficient.