Lambda the Ultimate

Delimited Control in OCaml, Abstractly and Concretely, System Description

We describe the first implementation of multi-prompt delimited control operators in OCaml that is direct in that it captures only the needed part of the control stack. The implementation is a library that requires no changes to the OCaml compiler or run-time, so it is perfectly compatible with existing OCaml source code and byte-code. The library has been in fruitful practical use for four years.

We present the library as an implementation of an abstract machine derived by elaborating the definitional machine. The abstract view lets us distill a minimalistic API, scAPI, sufficient for implementing multi-prompt delimited control. We argue that a language system that supports exception and stack-overflow handling supports scAPI. Our library illustrates how to use scAPI to implement multi-prompt delimited control in a typed language. The approach is general and can be used to add multi-prompt delimited control to other existing language systems.

Oleg was kind enough to send me an e-mail letting me know of this paper's existence (it appears not yet to be linked from the "Computation" page under which it is stored) and to include me in the acknowledgements. Since the paper in its current form has been accepted for publication, he indicated that it can be made more widely available, so here it is. In typical Oleg fashion, it offers insights at both the theoretical and implementation levels.

VMKit is an LLVM project; per the announcement at the Proceedings of the 2008 LLVM Developers' Meeting:

VMKit is an implementation of the Java and .NET Virtual Machines that use LLVM to optimize and JIT compile the code. This talk [slides, video] describes how VMKit integrates components from various systems, how bytecode translation works, describes the current performance status of the system, and discusses areas for future extension.

Tim Bray reports about half of the JVM language summit. Among the things he discusses are Clojure, PHP and JVM/CLR cross-pollination.

You can read the docs and download the C++ source here.

V8 is supposedly the main added value of Chrome, the newly announced Google browser.

Our discussion of the Chrome announcement enumerates some of the features of V8.

The proceedings of the 2008 LLVM Developers' Meeting have been posted. The presentations included some overviews of various LLVM subsystems and internals and a few projects targeting the LLVM. Previous meeting's proceedings are also available.

Phil Windley Technometria podcast is dedicated to the Google Web Toolkit. The guest on the show is Bruce Johnson a Tech Lead of GWT.

The show is very good, and more technical than usual. Many themes that are near and dear to LtU are discussed. Here are some pointers:

Bruce talks at length about the advantages of compiling from Java to JS, many of which arise from Java's static typing. He mainly talks about optimizations, but also about how static typing helps with tools in general (IDEs etc.). This was a subject of long and stormy debates here in the past.

The advantages, from a software engineering standpoint, of building in Java vs. JS are discussed. This is directly related to the ongoing discusison here on the new programming-in-the-large features added to JS2. I wonder if someone will write a compiler from Java/GWT to JS2 at some point, which will enable projects to move to JS2 and jump ship on Java all together.

Bruce mentions that since JS isn't class-based, and thus doesn't directly support the OO style many people are used to, there are many ways of translating common OO idioms into JS. This is, of course, the same type of dilemma the Scheme community has about many high level features. Cast as a question on OOP support the questions becomes is it better to provide language constructs that allow various libraries to add OO support in different ways, or to provide language support for a specific style. The same can be asked about a variety of features and programming styles, of course.

Finally, Bruce mentions that as far as he knows no one thought about something like GWT before they did. Well, I for one, and I don't think I was the only one, talked many times (probably on LtU) about Javascript as a VM/assembly language of the browser, clearly thinking about JS as a target language. I admint I wasn't thinking aobut compiling Java... But then, I am not into writing Java, so why would I think about Java as the source language...

Charles Nutter:

If you are interested in the future of non-Java languages on the JVM, you should be on this list. Yes, we talk about a lot of JVM lanuage implementation challenges, we discuss compilers and stack frames and call-site optimizations, but we also talk about features peripheral to language implementation like package indexing and retrofitting Java 5+ code. We need your help.

Abstract Interface Types in GNAT: Conversions, Discriminants, and C++. Javier Miranda and Edmond Schonberg.

Ada 2005 Abstract Interface Types provide a limited and practical form of multiple inheritance of specifications. In this paper we cover the following aspects of their implementation in the GNAT compiler: interface type conversions, the layout of variable sized tagged objects with interface progenitors, and the use of the GNAT compiler for interfacing with C++ classes with compatible inheritance trees.

The addition of interface types, of the type found in Java, to Ada2005 presented compiler writers with an implementation challenge. This is a third paper in a series describing the implementation of interfaces in the GNAT Ada compiler (an earlier paper dealt with synchronized interfaces, an interesting special case).

The present paper deals mainly with issues caused by interface type conversions, and the related data layout issues. Of special interest is section 6 which shows how to write a C++/Ada multi-language program, in which method calls can be dispatched across language boundaries. Handling the multiple inheritance in the C++ code in this example is possible because the base classes have only pure virtual functions.

I'm back... Going through my RSS feeds, two items caught my attention:

Tim Bray: Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, better known as “The JRuby Guys”, are joining Sun this month.

Jon Udell: Why argue about dynamic versus static languages when you can use both? Which discusses, among other things, why the first three versions of the IronPython compiler were written in Python, but today it's written in C#.

A report on Gilad Bracha's presentation at Lang.NET 2006 entitled "Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform".

We discussed several of the ideas mentioned, but I think we should continue to follow this story.