Progress Report: Exploring API Design for Capabilities for Programming with Arrays

In on-going work, we are exploring reference capabilities for arrays, with the intention of carrying over previous results on statically guaranteed data-race freedom to parallel array algorithms. Reference capabilities typically restrict incoming pointers to an object to one (uniqueness), or restrict operations via multiple pointer to a single object (e.g., to only read). Extending such a design to arrays involve operations such as logically partitioning an array so that even though there are multiple pointers to a single array, these pointers cannot access the same elements. In this paper, we report on the on-going work of a prototype implementation of array capabilities, focusing in particular on the "array capability API design", meaning the native operations on capabilities such as splitting and merging arrays. Using our prototype implementation, we translate several existing array algorithms into using array capabilities and qualitatively study the result. In addition to identifying the need for additional operations, we study what features are commonly exercised, what are the recurring patterns, and how reliance on direct element addressing using indexes can be reduced. We end by discussing a possible design for a more performant implementation once the API is fixed.