A Tour of Gallifrey, a Language for Geodistributed Programming.

Programming efficient distributed, concurrent systems requires new abstractions that go beyond traditional sequential programming. But programmers already have trouble getting sequential code right, so simplicity is essential. The core problem is that low-latency, high-availability access to data requires replication of mutable state. Keeping replicas fully consistent is expensive, so the question is how to expose asynchronously replicated objects to programmers in a way that allows them to reason simply about their code. We propose an answer to this question in our ongoing work designing a new language, Gallifrey, which provides orthogonal replication through _restrictions_ with _merge strategies_, _contingencies_ for conflicts arising from concurrency, and _branches_, a novel concurrency control construct inspired by version control, to contain provisional behavior.