Lambda the Ultimate

I was just getting all depressed realizing that I'd probably have to write a syntax extension in camlp4 to get reflection out of O'Caml. Then I discovered that someone just did recently. This serves both as a practical implementation of reflection for a statically-typed language and as a showcase for O'Caml/camlp4's ability to define new syntax.

HashCaml

Peter Sewell and crew follow up on their work on Acute:

In this paper we put these ideas into practice, describing the HashCaml extension to the OCaml bytecode compiler, which supports type-safe and abstraction-safe marshalling, together with related naming constructs. Our contribution is threefold: (1) We show how to define globally meaningful runtime type names for key OCaml type constructs that were not covered in our previous work, dealing with the generativity issues involved: user-defined variant and record types, substructures, functors, arbitrary ascription, separate compilation, and external C functions. (2) We support marshalling within polymorphic functions by type-passing, requiring us to build compositional runtime type names and revisit the OCaml relaxed value restriction. We show that with typed marshalling one must fall back to the SML97 value restriction. (3) We show how the above can be implemented with reasonable performance as an unintrusive modification to the existing OCaml language, implementation, and standard libraries. An alpha release of HashCaml, capable of bootstrapping itself, is available, along with an example type-safe distributed communication library written in the language.

...there is a deep malaise in computer science these days. Professors bemoan falling enrollments, a decline in prestige and a lack of attention to real-world problems. But, paradoxically, they say the future of CS has never been brighter, both within the discipline and in fields that computer technology will increasingly influence. Computerworld's Gary Anthes recently asked six CS professors what lies ahead for the field.

This piece isn't directly related to programming languages (in fact, I think this is one of the problems with it), but it will interest many LtU regulars.

To make this more relevant for LtU, let me rephrase the question: What's the most important and interesting CS research at the moment, from a PL perspective?

Are there any links to online lectures for a course on programming languages? (apart from SICP lectures)