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Microsoft Has Released Axum

Posted by Abel Avram on May 11, 2009

Sections: Development
Topics: .NET ,; Programming ,; Language ,; Parallel Programming

InfoQ announced Microsoft’s plan to ship Axum, an incubation language project, 2 weeks ago. In the meantime Microsoft has finished packaging an early release (v. 0.1) and made it available for download.

For an introduction to Axum please read "Axum, Microsoft’s Approach to Parallelism".

Axum still remains an incubation project and this release is used to collect community’s feedback according to Microsoft DevLabs:

Feedback is the biggest factor in the success of Axum, whether it will become a product and, most important, whether it can help make parallel programming safer, more scalable, and more productive.

Niklas Gustafsson, an Architect on Parallel Computing Platform at Microsoft, said in few words how Axum came about:

1. We took the CCR sources, changed most of the names, slightly refactored the interfaces and added a few things.
2. We built it into Microsoft.Axum.Runtime.dll
3. We built channel ports on top of CCR Ports (renamed OrderedInteractionPoints).
4. We exposed OIP to programmers (see the WebFetcher sample).
5. We built 'async,' 'sync,' and 'const' empty/full storage capabilites on some additions we made to CCR.
6. The 'receive' expression utilizes a Receiver to hook into the source.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is needed to write in Axum.

Useful links: Download page, The Axum Language Specification (PDF), Axum Programmer’s Guide (PDF), Axum Team Blog.