Lambda the Ultimate

This is sort of silly, but just plain cool. Eli Fox-Epstein encoded Rule 110 in HTML5 and CSS3. Rule 110 is Turing complete.

See one of his example tests on Github.

Keyword and Optional Arguments in PLT Scheme, Matthew Flatt and Eli Barzilay, 2009 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming.

The lambda and procedure-application forms in PLT Scheme support arguments that are tagged with keywords, instead of identified by position, as well as optional arguments with default values. Unlike previous keyword-argument systems for Scheme, a keyword is not self-quoting as an expression, and keyword arguments use a different calling convention than non-keyword arguments. Consequently, a keyword serves more reliably (e.g., in terms of error reporting) as a lightweight syntactic delimiter on procedure arguments. Our design requires no changes to the PLT Scheme core compiler, because lambda and application forms that support keywords are implemented by macros over conventional core forms that lack keyword support.

As usual, a solid paper by the PLTers, this time on flexible argument passing. Making named arguments apparent at compile-time (by introducing keyword symbols that may not be used as ordinary values) seems right and enables some optimizations. There are also some nice Racket-specifics in there, such as the use of the customizable application form #%app, which - together with "applicable structure types" - allows the implementation of named arguments in "userland". The paper is rounded out by a performance evaluation and a description of similar facilities in other languages.

I think this is a very good design (and implementation technique) for named arguments. A facility [edit: syntax support] for receiving all named arguments of a function seems to be missing though - but it can probably be added in userland, too.

Leveled Garbage Collection by Guanshan Tong and Michael J. O'Donnell:

Generational garbage collection (GGC) is one of the most popular garbage collection techniques. GGC gains a performance advantage by performing minor collections on the younger objects in the heap, reducing the number of major collections of the whole heap. A promotion policy determines when an object moves from the younger generation to the older. The design of GGC has been justified by the plausible assumption that many objects die very young, and a few live a very long time. But, attempts to tune the performance of GGC by adjusting the promotion policy have been disappointing - only the simplest immediate promotion policy has proved attractive. The success of GGC is probably due to simplicity and to avoiding scans of the whole heap, rather than to accurate lifetime predictions.
This paper presents Leveled Garbage Collection (LGC), a new algorithm that is not based on object ages. It uses a heap structure and collection scheme similar to those of generational garbage collectors, and has a non-age-based promotion policy that doesn't promote all of the live objects, but still guarantees ample free space immediately after each garbage collection. By tuning LGC's promotion policy, we can often improve on GGC with immediate promotion.
Performance comparisons show that LGC outperforms GGC with immediate promotion policy in many cases, while losing only slightly on cases favorable to immediate promotion. LGC has a substantial advantage when the heap fits in main memory, and an even greater advantage as the heap gets paged to disk.

Leveled GC is based on a more general heuristic than generational GC, in that it tries to keep as many objects as possible in the nursery because minor collections are so much cheaper. What I found most interesting about this paper is that it scales well with virtual memory, which as we know can degrade performance significantly. They provide benchmarks demonstrating a marked difference when large heap sizes trigger paging (Section 5.2.2). LGC performance is hardly affected, while the runtime of generational GC degrades significantly.

Memory Models: A Case for Rethinking Parallel Languages and Hardware by Sarita V. Adve and Hans-J. Boehm

This is a pre-print of the actual version.

The era of parallel computing for the masses is here, but writing correct parallel programs remains far more difficult than writing sequential programs. Aside from a few domains, most parallel programs are written using a shared-memory approach. The memory model, which specifies the meaning of shared variables, is at the heart of this programming model. Unfortunately, it has involved a tradeoff between programmability and performance, and has arguably been one of the most challenging and contentious areas in both hardware architecture and programming language specification. Recent broad community-scale efforts have finally led to a convergence in this debate, with popular languages such as Java and C++ and most hardware vendors publishing compatible memory model specifications. Although this convergence is a dramatic improvement, it has exposed fundamental shortcomings in current popular languages and systems that prevent achieving the vision of structured and safe parallel programming.

This paper discusses the path to the above convergence, the hard lessons learned, and their implications. A cornerstone of this convergence has been the view that the memory model should be a contract between the programmer and the system - if the programmer writes disciplined (data-race-free) programs, the system will provide high programmability (sequential consistency) and performance. We discuss why this view is the best we can do with current popular languages, and why it is inadequate moving forward. We then discuss research directions that eliminate much of the concern about the memory model, but require rethinking popular parallel languages and hardware. In particular, we argue that parallel languages should not only promote high-level disciplined models, but they should also enforce the discipline. Further, for scalable and efficient performance, hardware should be co-designed to take advantage of and support such disciplined models. The inadequacies of the state-of-the-art and the research agenda we outline have deep implications for the practice, research, and teaching of many computer science sub-disciplines, spanning theory, software, and hardware.

Didn't notice this linked on LtU yet.

Tractatus Digito-Philosophicus, part of the project Wittgenstein for programmers by Harrison Ainsworth (whose blog is very much recommended to LtUers).

This is a somewhat odd venture: a translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus into the domain of software development.

The software intellect – its basic conceptual forms – is rooted in the early 20th century, the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s. That is where the work of Church and Turing, lambda calculus and computability, comes from. And it is also the time of the Vienna Circle, logical positivism, and Wittgenstein's early work, the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’.

One might notice one day that software seems pointedly related to its original philosophical contemporaries. It is fundamentally a logical construction. It is like a Wittgensteinian logical proposition, but instead of describing the world, software constructs the imagination. There is a clear isomorphism. All terms related to describing map to terms related to constructing, and similarly for world and imagination. It seems a simple transformation will take Wittgenstein to software.

So an interesting project emerges: translate the Tractatus into software terms! The result is sometimes obscure, but sometimes clearer than the original, and most is (still) quite odd and intriguing (which is perhaps the main virtue anyway) . . .

(So far it is only partial and unfinished.)

Habit is a systems programming dialect of Haskell from the High-Assurance Systems Programming (HASP) project at Portland State University. From The Habit Programming Language: The Revised Preliminary Report

This report presents a preliminary design for the programming language Habit, a dialect of Haskell that supports the development of high quality systems software. The primary commitments of the design are as follows:

* Systems programming: Unlike Haskell, which was intended to serve as a general purpose functional programming language, the design of Habit focusses on features that are needed in systems software development. These priorities are reflected fairly directly in the new features that Habit provides for describing bit-level and memory-based data representations, the introduction of new syntactic extensions to facilitate monadic programming, and, most significantly, the adoption of a call-by-value semantics to improve predictability of execution. The emphasis on systems programming also impacts the design in less direct ways, including assumptions about the expected use of whole program compilation and optimization strategies in a practical Habit implementation.

* High assurance: Although most details of Haskell’s semantics have been formalized at some point in the research literature, there is no consolidated formal description of the whole language. There are also known differences in semantics, particularly with respect to operational behavior, between different Haskell implementations in areas where the Haskell report provides no guidance. Although it is not addressed in the current report, a high-priority for Habit is to provide a full, formal semantics for the complete language that can be used as a foundation for reasoning and formal verification, a mechanism for ensuring consistency between implementations, and a basis for reliably predicting details about memory allocation, asymptotic behavior, and resource utilization.

HASP has a couple of postdoc positions open to help with Habit.

A nice presentation on Practical Haskell Programming: Scripting with Types from Don Stewart.

Macros that Work Together - Compile-Time Bindings, Partial Expansion, and Definition Contexts, Matthew Flatt, Ryan Culpepper, David Darais, and Robert Bruce Findler. Under consideration for publication in J. Functional Programming.

Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) is a large language that is built mostly within itself. Unlike the usual
approach taken by non-Lisp languages, the self-hosting of Racket is not a matter of bootstrapping
one implementation through a previous implementation, but instead a matter of building a tower of
languages and libraries via macros. The upper layers of the tower include a class system, a component
system, pedagogic variants of Scheme, a statically typed dialect of Scheme, and more. The demands
of this language-construction effort require a macro system that is substantially more expressive than
previous macro systems. In particular, while conventional Scheme macro systems handle stand-alone
syntactic forms adequately, they provide weak support for macros that share information or macros
that use existing syntactic forms in new contexts.

This paper describes and models novel features of the Racket macro system, including support for
general compile-time bindings, sub-form expansion and analysis, and environment management. The
presentation assumes a basic familiarity with Lisp-style macros, and it takes for granted the need for
macros that respect lexical scope. The model, however, strips away the pattern and template system
that is normally associated with Scheme macros, isolating a core that is simpler, that can support
pattern and template forms themselves as macros, and that generalizes naturally to Racket’s other
extensions.

A good description of Racket's rocket science tools for growing languages.

In Invertible Syntax Descriptions: Unifying Parsing and Pretty Printing, Rendel Tillmann and Klaus Ostermann at the University of Marburg, Germany apply the "don't repeat yourself" principle to parsers and pretty printers.

Parsers and pretty-printers for a language are often quite similar, yet both are typically implemented separately, leading to redundancy and potential inconsistency. We propose a new interface of syntactic descriptions, with which both parser and pretty-printer can be described as a single program. Whether a syntactic description is used as a parser or as a pretty-printer is determined by the implementation of the interface. Syntactic descriptions enable programmers to describe the connection between concrete and abstract syntax once and for all, and use these descriptions for parsing or pretty-printing as needed. We also discuss the generalization of our programming technique towards an algebra of partial isomorphisms.