Lambda the Ultimate

ErlOCaml, a "tight bridge between Erlang and OCaml".

Found this mentioned in the "Erlang and OCaml" talk in the proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop 2007.

As the talk-slides say, there is "No particular progress yet", but it is an interesting idea.
Here is the first slide:

Why???

• Erlang is very good at concurrency
• Not so good at raw sequential processing
• Strong momentum in systems programming
• OCaml has a reputation for speed
• No particular momentum in concurrency programming
• We should try to lower the barriers between different FP languages

The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite). Michael Stonebraker, Samuel Madden, Daniel J. Abadi, Stavros Harizopoulos, Nabil Hachem, Pat Helland. VLDB 2007.

A not directly PL-related paper about a new database architecture, but the authors provide some interesting and possibly controversial perspectives:

• They split the application into per-core, single-threaded instances without any communication between them.
• Instead of using SQL from an external (web app) process to communicate with the database, they envision embedding Ruby on Rails directly into the database.
• They state that most database warehouse tasks rely on pre-canned queries only, so there is no need for ad-hoc querying.

The somewhat performance-focused abstract:

In two previous papers some of us predicted the end of "one size fits all" as a commercial relational DBMS paradigm. These papers presented reasons and experimental evidence that showed that the major RDBMS vendors can be outperformed by 1-2 orders of magnitude by specialized engines in the data warehouse, stream processing, text, and scientific data base markets.

Assuming that specialized engines dominate these markets over time, the current relational DBMS code lines will be left with the business data processing (OLTP) market and hybrid markets where more than one kind of capability is required. In this paper we show that current RDBMSs can be beaten by nearly two orders of magnitude in the OLTP market as well. The experimental evidence comes from comparing a new OLTP prototype, H-Store, which we have built at M.I.T. to one of the popular RDBMSs on the standard transactional benchmark, TPC-C.

We conclude that the current RDBMS code lines, while attempting to be a "one size fits all" solution, in fact, excel at nothing. Hence, they are 25 year old legacy code lines that should be retired in favor of a collection of "from scratch" specialized engines. The DBMS vendors (and the research community) should start with a clean sheet of paper and design systems for tomorrow's requirements, not continue to push code lines and architectures designed for the yesterday's requirements.

A critical comment by Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels.

With an emphasis on providing practical advice, Code Generation 2008 is the ideal opportunity for architects, developers and others to understand how to benefit from emerging tools and technologies in the broad area of Code Generation.

Call for Speakers:
Submission Deadline: Friday January 18th 2008

We are currently seeking high-quality session proposals covering topics in model-driven software development (including Software Factories, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), Generative Programming, Software Product Lines and related areas).

Sessions could cover topics such as:
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- Defining and implementing modelling languages
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- Language evolution and modularization
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- Runtime virtual machines versus direct code generation

Real-world case studies based on any aspect of these and related approaches are particularly encouraged although more theoretical sessions are also welcome.

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Generation is the next evolutionary step in Software Development.

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Code Generation 2008 takes place in Cambridge, UK from 25th - 27th June 2008

For more information on proposing a session please visit:
http://www.codegeneration.net/conference/speak.php

What people said about our previous conference - Code Generation 2007:

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