161 papers · page 1 of 9
Virtual Machines, Dynamic Compllers, and Implementation Frameworks make dynamic langauges easier and more efficient to optimize. Meanwhile, IDEs, provers, dependent types, type inferencers, and (so-called) “generative AI” mean programmers can express - statically - more informati…
Programming languages offer a number of abstractions such as dynamic typing, sandboxing, and automatic garbage collection which, however, come at a performance cost. Looking back, the most influential programming languages were proposed at a time when Moore’s Law was still in pla…
Polyglot programming is the practice of writing an application with multiple languages to capture additional functionality and efficiency not available to a single language. This happens more often than people think. Some reasons are: to support different platforms (e.g., Android…
Though the 2010s saw many research publications about languages such as JavaScript and Python, there currently appears to be a general loss of interest in dynamic languages, with popular new languages such as Rust and Zig being statically typed, and AOT compilation often being vi…
Over the past decade software development has shifted from a process centered around writing code to a process that increasingly involves composition of external packages and managing the integration of code from other team members. The next decade-plus will be defined by the shi…
Dynamic languages have evolved quite a bit over the past few decades. While there’s always room for improvement, the current generation of languages have rich semantics and expressive syntax, making for a pleasant developer experience. Developers can clearly represent ideas, decr…
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a virtual machine whose defining characteristic is that it is low-level: Wasm is designed to abstract the hardware below, not language concepts above. This is a prerequisite for providing predictable performance and for avoiding language bias without feature…
Since the first bug was discovered in the Mark Harvard II electromechanical computer it was clear that finding bugs and debugging of computer systems would be an extremely challenging task. Today, various reports indicated that programmers spend approximately 50% of their time on…
Applications written in dynamic languages are becoming larger and larger and companies increasingly use multi-million line codebases in production. At the same time, dynamic languages rely heavily on dynamic optimizations, particularly those that reduce the overhead of method cal…
With the wide adoption of the language server protocol, the desire to have IDE-style tooling even for niche and research languages has exploded. The Truffle language framework facilitates this desire by offering an almost zero-effort approach to language implementers to providing…
Union and intersection types are a staple of gradually typed languages such as TypeScript. While it's long been recognized that union and intersection types are difficult to verify statically, it may appear at first that the dynamic part of gradual typing is actually pretty simpl…
The R programming language is widely used for statistical computing. To enable interactive data exploration and rapid prototyping, R encourages a dynamic programming style. This programming style is supported by features such as first-class environments. Amongst widely used langu…
The first Futamura projection enables compilation and high performance code generation of user programs by partial evaluation of language interpreters. Previous work has shown that online partial evaluation can yield the same peak performance as a specialized JIT compiler. Howeve…
Communicating Sequential Process (CSP) is nowadays a popular concurrency model in which threads/processes communicate by exchanging data through channels. Channels help in orchestrating concurrent processes but do not solve per-se data races. To prevent data races in the channel …
Many functional languages---including Racket, Clojure, and Scala---provide a persistent-map datatype with an implementation based on Hash Array Mapped Tries (HAMTs). HAMTs enable efficient functional lookup, insertion, and deletion operations with a small memory footprint, especi…
To efficiently execute dynamically typed languages, many language implementations have adopted a two-tier architecture. The first tier aims for low-latency startup times and collects dynamic profiles, such as the dynamic types of variables. The second tier provides high-throughpu…
Most virtual machines employ just-in-time (JIT) compilers to achieve high-performance. Trace-based compilation and method-based compilation are two major compilation strategies in JIT compilers. In general, the former excels in compiling programs with more in-depth method calls a…
Execution times may be reduced by offloading parallel loop nests to a GPU. Auto-parallelizing compilers are common for static languages, often using a cost model to determine when the GPU execution speed will outweigh the offload overheads. Nowadays scientific software is increas…
Many researchers have explored retrofitting static type systems to dynamic languages. This raises the question of how to add type annotations to code that was previously untyped. One obvious solution is type inference. However, in complex type systems, in particular those with st…
Pattern matching allows programs both to extract specific information from complex data types, as well as to branch on the structure of data and thus apply specialized actions to different forms of data. Originally designed for strongly typed functional languages with algebraic d…