Lambda the Ultimate

Type Systems as Macros, by Stephen Chang, Alex Knauth, Ben Greenman:

We present TURNSTILE, a metalanguage for creating typed embedded languages. To implement the type system, programmers write type checking rules resembling traditional judgment syntax. To implement the semantics, they incorporate elaborations into these rules. TURNSTILE critically depends on the idea of linguistic reuse. It exploits a macro system in a novel way to simultaneously type check and rewrite a surface program into a target language. Reusing a macro system also yields modular implementations whose rules may be mixed and matched to create other languages. Combined with typical compiler and runtime reuse, TURNSTILE produces performant typed embedded languages with little effort.

This looks pretty awesome considering it's not limited to simple typed languages, but extends all the way to System F and F-omega! Even better, they can reuse previous type systems to define new ones, thereby reducing the effort to implement more expressive type systems. All code and further details available here, and here's a blog post where Ben Greenman further discusses the related "type tailoring", and of course, these are both directly related to Active Libraries.

Taken to its extreme, why not have an assembler with a powerful macro system of this sort as your host language, and every high-level language would be built on this. I'm not sure if this approach would extend that far, but it's an interesting idea. You'd need a cpp-like highly portable macro tool, and porting to a new platform consists of writing architecture-specific macros for some core language, like System F.

This work may also conceptually dovetail with another thread discussing fexprs and compilation.