Lambda the Ultimate

Parsing@SLE is a new workshop on parsing programming languages and other software languages. The intended participants are the authors of parser generation tools and parsers for programming languages and other software languages. For the purpose of this workshop "parsing" is a computation that takes a sequence of characters as input and produces a tree or graph shaped model as output. This possibly includes tokenization using regular expressions, deriving trees using context-free grammars, mapping to abstract syntax trees and perhaps even some semantic analysis.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together today's experts in the field of parsing, in order to explore open questions and possibly forge new collaborations. The topics may include algorithms, implementation and generation techniques, syntax and semantics of meta formalisms (BNF), etc. We expect to attract participants that have been or are developing theory, techniques and tools in the broad area of parsing non-natural languages such as programming languages and other software languages (domain specific languages, configuration languages, build languages, data description languages, query languages, etc.)

We solicit short abstracts, asking for positions, demonstrations and early achievements. The submissions will be reviewed on relevance and clarity, and used to plan the mostly interactive sessions of the day.

* workshop website
* Deadline August 15 2013
* Notification September 1 2013
* Submit a position paper

I mentioned this on one of the earlier threads on JVM security; it's the cumulation of my attempts to lock-down the JVM securely, and finally giving up and just writing my own. It's now reached the point where its actually pretty usable, with a good spread of test cases. Apart from the security angle, its small size would make it useful for doing all sorts of VM-related experimentation.

Metascala is a tiny metacircular Java Virtual Machine (JVM) written in the Scala programming language. Metascala is barely 3000 lines of Scala, and is complete enough that it is able to interpret itself metacircularly. Being written in Scala and compiled to Java bytecode, the Metascala JVM requires a host JVM in order to run.

The goal of Metascala is to create a platform to experiment with the JVM: a 3000 line JVM written in Scala is probably much more approachable than the 1,000,000 lines of C/C++ which make up HotSpot, the standard implementation, and more amenable to implementing fun features like continuations, isolates or value classes.