Lambda the Ultimate

Super and Inner — Together at Last! by David S. Goldberg, Robert Bruce Findler, and Matthew Flatt, 2004.

In an object-oriented language, a derived class may declare a method with the same signature as a method in the base class. The meaning of the re-declaration depends on the language. Most commonly, the new declaration overrides the base declaration, perhaps completely replacing it, or perhaps using super to invoke the old implementation. Another possibility is that the base class always controls the method implementation, and the new declaration merely augments the method in the case that the base method calls inner. Each possibility has advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we explain why programmers need both kinds of method redeclaration, and we present a language that integrates them. We also present a formal semantics for the new language, and we describe an implementation for MzScheme.

To me, an interesting aspect was interleaving of overrides and augmentations of the same method.

There's no PL content per se in this presentation, but a PL weenie will surely think of a DSL for almost every slide, so I hope posting this is warranted.

Tim Sweeney has written previously on the programming challenges raised by game development (The Next Mainstream Programming Languages: A Game Developer's Perspective), and I think this presentation is another showcase of the huge problems that need solving in game development.

Finally, I wonder why anyone would use a language that doesn't allow quick and simple syntax extension for driving a game engine? Seriously, the possibilities for ad-hoc DSLs seem endless.

The gaming studio Electronic Arts maintains their own version of the Standard Template Library. Despite the fact this is old news, I checked the LtU Archives and the new site, and there is no mention of EASTL anywhere. There are quite a few good blog posts about EASTL on the Internet, as well as the the following paper, EASTL -- Electronic Arts Standard Template Library by Paul Pedriana:

Gaming platforms and game designs place requirements on game software which differ from requirements of other platforms. Most significantly, game software requires large amounts of memory but has a limited amount to work with. Gaming software is also faced with other limitations such as weaker processor caches, weaker CPUs, and non-default memory alignment requirements. A result of this is that game software needs to be careful with its use of memory and the CPU. The C++ standard library's containers, iterators, and algorithms are potentially useful for a variety of game programming needs. However, weaknesses and omissions of the standard library prevent it from being ideal for high performance game software. Foremost among these weaknesses is the allocator model. An extended and partially redesigned replacement (EASTL) for the C++ standard library was implemented at Electronic Arts in order to resolve these weaknesses in a portable and consistent way. This paper describes game software development issues, perceived weaknesses of the current C++ standard, and the design of EASTL as a partial solution for these weaknesses.

This paper is a good introduction to a unique set of requirements video game development studios face, and compliments Manuel Simoni's recent story about The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead. This paper could be a useful inroad to those seeking to apply newer object-functional programming languages and ideas to game development.

Semantic types: a fresh look at the ideal model for types, Jerome Vouillon and Paul-André Melliès. POPL 2004.

We present a generalization of the ideal model for recursive polymorphic types. Types are defined as sets of terms instead of sets of elements of a semantic domain. Our proof of the existence of types (computed by fixpoint of a typing operator) does not rely on metric properties, but on the fact that the identity is the limit of a sequence of projection terms. This establishes a connection with the work of Pitts on relational properties of domains. This also suggests that ideals are better understood as closed sets of terms defined by orthogonality with respect to a set of contexts.

A couple of days ago, we had a post about game models of linear logic, which led to a discussion of Girard's ludics. One of the key ingredients of ludics is the idea of biorthogonality, which is the idea that the semantics of types should be stable under biorthogonality. Now, the idea of biorthogonality is that for every term in a language has an orthogonal -- the set of client programs with which our term will run safely together. A set of terms is a biorthogonal when it is equal to the orthogonal of its orthogonal. The reason this idea is interesting is that it offers a way to sensibly pass back and forth between a local, proof-theoretic notion of "type as intro and elim rule" and a global, semantic notion of type as "predicate on terms".

This paper offers a relatively accessible entry point to those ideas, assuming you're familiar with the basic ideas behind either solving domain equations or doing logical relations proofs.