GPCE’10 Tutorial Lecture: Agile and Efficient Domain-Specific Languages using Multi-stage Programming in Java Mint

Eddy, Walid, and I proposed a tutorial lecture for GPCE’10, and we’re delighted to report that it has been accepted for presentation on Sunday, October 10, 2010.

Agile and Efficient Domain-Specific Languages using Multi-stage Programming in Java Mint

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are a powerful productivity tool
because they allow domain experts, who are not necessarily programming
experts, to quickly develop programs. DSL implementations have unique
constraints for programming languages because they must be efficient,
in order to ensure high productivity, but they must also be agile, in
order to meet the rapidly changing demands of their domains. In this
tutorial we show how multi-stage programming (MSP) can be used to
build staged interpreters, which combine the agility of interpreters
with the efficiency of compilers. The tutorial is conducted in Java
Mint, an multi-stage Java based on recent work incorporating MSP into
imperative object-oriented languages. In the first half of
the tutorial, we introduce MSP by demonstrating how to write a staged
interpreter for a number of basic language constructs, such as
recursive functions, conditionals, and let expressions. In the second
half, we extend our staged interpreter to take advantage of several
well-known compiler optimizations, including type inference, constant
folding, and static parallel loop scheduling. We highlight the opportunities
afforded by using MSP with object-oriented design to quickly create
efficient DSL implementations.

Brief Outline of Tutorial

This tutorial uses Java Mint to introduce MSP in imperative,
object-oriented languages. We will progress as follows:

  1. Introduction to MSP, the three language constructs “bracket”,
    “escape” and “run”, and their use in Java Mint.
  2. Brief overview of MSP applications other than interpreters.
  3. Development of a staged interpreter for a small DSL. We
    incrementally add:

    1. Arithmetic expressions
    2. Conditionals
    3. Recursive functions
    4. Let expressions
  4. Application of compiler optimizations in the interpreter
    for our DSL. We discuss:

    1. Extending the interpreter with multiple data types
    2. Type inference
    3. Constant folding
    4. Static parallel loop scheduling

Biographies

Mathias Ricken is a doctoral candidate in the Programming Languages
Team at Rice University and one of the principal developers of the
DrJava integrated development environment. His research interests
include concurrent programming, extending the Java language, and
computer science education. He is the developer of the Concutest
concurrent unit testing framework and has created various experimental
extensions of Java to address, for instance, programming with
meta-data. Currently, Mathias is contributing to Java Mint, a
multi-stage extension of Java that allows safe and expressive
statically typed program generation and specialization in an
imperative language setting.

Edwin Westbrook is a post-doctoral researcher at Rice University. His
primary interests are in developing techniques for implementing and
verifying properties of domain-specific languages (DSLs). He has
worked on a number of projects in this area, including: Cinic, a type
theory for building machine-checked proofs of properties of DSLs using
a new approach to higher-order abstract syntax; Java Mint, a
multi-stage version of Java used for efficient implementations of
DSLs; and Acumen, a DSL for designing cyber-physical systems.

Walid Taha is an professor at Halmstad University. His current interest is in modeling and simulation of cyberphysical systems. He was the principal investigator on a number of research awards and contracts from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Semi-conductor Research Consortium (SRC), and Texas Advanced Technology Program (ATP). He received an NSF CAREER award to develop Java Mint. He is the principle designer Java Mint, Acumen, MetaOCaml, and the Verilog Preprocessor. He founded the ACM Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE), the IFIP Working Group on Program Generation (WG 2.11), and the Middle Earth Programming Languages Seminar (MEPLS). In 2009, he chaired the IFIP Working Conference on Domain Specific Languages (DSLs).

(Re-posted from The Java Mint Blog.)

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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