Lambda the Ultimate

Recycling Continuations, Jonathan Sobel and Daniel P. Friedman. ICFP 1998

If the continuations in functional data-structure-generating programs are made explicit and represented as records, they can be "recycled." Once they have served their purpose as temporary, intermediate structures for managing program control, the space they occupy can be reused for the structures that the programs produce as their output. To effect this immediate memory reclamation, we use a sequence of correctness-preserving program transformations, demonstrated through a series of simple examples. We then apply the transformations to general anamorphism operators, with the important consequence that all finite-output anamorphisms can now be run without any stack- or continuation-space overhead.

This is a fun paper, and exactly the kind of thing I find addictive: it uses some elegant theory to formalize and systematize a clever hackerly trick.

WaveScope is a system for developing distributed, high-rate applications that need to process streams of data from various sources (e.g., sensors) using a combination of signal processing and database (event stream processing) operations. The execution environment for these applications ranges from embedded sensor nodes to multicore/multiprocessor servers.

WaveScript is the programming language used to develop WaveScope applications. It is a high-level, functional, stream-processing language that aims to deliver uncompromising performance. WaveScript programs execute in parallel on multiple cores, or distributed across a network. Its compiler uses aggressive partial evaluation techniques to remove abstractions and reduce the source program to a graph of stream operators.

This came up in the discussion group and since it is cool (both the project and the language), and the other editors are mostly MIA, I thought I'd bring it to the attention of those who only follow the home page.

To get a taste of the language click here.