Supporting Persistent C++ Objects in a Distributed Storage System

The authors have designed and implemented a C++ object layer for Khazana, a distributed persistent storage system that exports a flat shared address space as its basic abstraction. The C++ layer described herein lets programmers use familiar C++ idioms to allocate, manipulate, and deallocate persistent shared data structures. It handles the tedious details involved in accessing this shared data, replicating it, maintaining consistency, converting data representations between persistent and in-memory representations, associating type information including methods with objects, etc. To support the C++ object layer on top of Khazana's flat storage abstraction, they have developed a language-specific preprocessor that generates support code to manage the user-specified persistent C++ structures.