The join-calculus is a process calculus developed at INRIA. The join-calculus was developed to provide a formal basis for the design of distributed programming languages, and therefore intentionally avoids communications constructs found in other process calculi, such as rendezvous communications, which are difficult to implement in a distributed setting[1]. Despite this limitation, the join-calculus is as expressive as the full -calculus. Encodings of the -calculus in the join-calculus, and vice-versa, have been demonstrated[2].
The join-calculus is a member of the -calculus family of process calculi, and can be considered, at its core, an asynchronous -calculus with several strong restrictions[3]:
However, as a language for programming, the join-calculus offers at least one convenience over the -calculus — namely the use of multi-way join patterns, the ability to match against messages from multiple channels simultaneously.
The join-calculus programming language is based on the join-calculus process calculus. It is implemented as an interpreter written in OCaml, and supports statically typed distributed programming, transparent remote communication, agent-based mobility, and failure-detection[4].
JoCaml is a version of OCaml extended with join-calculus primitives.
Polyphonic C# and its successor Cω extend C#.
MC# and Parallel C# extend Polyphonic C# and also devoted to .NET.
The Boost.Join library is an implementation in C++.
A Concurrent Basic proposal that uses Join-calculus