Confessions of a used programming language salesman

MeijerErik,

doi:10.1145/1297105.1297078

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 38 publications

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“…Meanwhile, at the same time, functional programming has been undeniably gaining traction in recent years, as is evidenced by the ongoing trend of traditionally objectoriented or imperative languages being extended with functional features, such as lambdas in Java 8 [7], C++11 [9], and Visual Basic 9 [16], the perceived importance of functional programming in general empirical studies on software developers [17], and the popularity of functional programming massively online open courses (MOOCs) [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spores: A Type-Based Foundation for Closures in the Age of Concurrency and Distribution

Miller

Haller²,

Odersky

2014

ECOOP 2014 – Object-Oriented Programming

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Functional programming (FP) is regularly touted as the way forward for bringing parallel, concurrent, and distributed programming to the mainstream. The popularity of the rationale behind this viewpoint has even led to a number of object-oriented (OO) programming languages outside the Smalltalk tradition adopting functional features such as lambdas and thereby function closures. However, despite this established viewpoint of FP as an enabler, reliably distributing function closures over a network, or using them in concurrent environments nonetheless remains a challenge across FP and OO languages. This paper takes a step towards more principled distributed and concurrent programming by introducing a new closure-like abstraction and type system, called spores, that can guarantee closures to be serializable, thread-safe, or even have custom user-defined properties. Crucially, our system is based on the principle of encoding type information corresponding to captured variables in the type of a spore. We prove our type system sound, implement our approach for Scala, evaluate its practicality through a small empirical study, and show the power of these guarantees through a case analysis of real-world distributed and concurrent frameworks that this safe foundation for closures facilitates.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spores: A Type-Based Foundation for Closures in the Age of Concurrency and Distribution

Miller

Haller²,

Odersky

2014

ECOOP 2014 – Object-Oriented Programming

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Chapter 5 Dynamically Typed Languages

Tratt¹

2009

Advances in Computers

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Steno

Murray

Isard

2011

SIGPLAN Not.

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Declarative queries enable programmers to write data manipulation code without being aware of the underlying data structure implementation. By increasing the level of abstraction over imperative code, they improve program readability and, crucially, create opportunities for automatic parallelization and optimization. For example, the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions to C# allow the same declarative query to process in-memory collections, and datasets that are distributed across a compute cluster. However, our experiments show that the serial performance of declarative code is several times slower than the equivalent hand-optimized code, because it is implemented using run-time abstractions-such as iterators-that incur overhead due to virtual function calls and superfluous instructions.To address this problem, we have developed Steno, which uses a combination of novel and well-known techniques to generate code for declarative queries that is almost as efficient as handoptimized code. Steno translates a declarative LINQ query into type-specialized, inlined and loop-based imperative code. It eliminates chains of iterators from query execution, and optimizes nested queries. We have implemented Steno for uniprocessor, multiprocessor and distributed computing platforms, and show that, for a real-world distributed job, it can almost double the speed of endto-end execution.

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Confessions of a used programming language salesman

Cited by 5 publications

References 38 publications

Spores: A Type-Based Foundation for Closures in the Age of Concurrency and Distribution

Spores: A Type-Based Foundation for Closures in the Age of Concurrency and Distribution

Chapter 5 Dynamically Typed Languages

Steno

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