Evolving a language in and for the real world

Current C++ implementations typecheck templates in two phases: Before instantiation, those parts of the template are checked that do not depend on template parameters, while the checking of the remaining parts is delayed until template instantiation time when the template arguments become available. This approach is problematic because it causes two major usability problems. First, it prevents library developers to provide guarantees about the type correctness for modules involving templates. Second, it can lead, through the incorrect use of template functions, to inscrutable error messages. Moreover, errors are often reported far away from the source of the program fault.To address this problem, we have developed a type system for Garcia's type-reflective calculus that allows a more precise characterization of types and thus a better utilization of type information within template definitions. This type system allows the static detection of many type errors that could previously only be detected after template instantiation. The additional precision and earlier detection time is achieved through the use of so-called "choice types" and corresponding typing rules that support the static reasoning about underspecified template types. The main contribution of this paper is a guarantee of the type safety of C++ templates (general definitions with specializations) since we can show that well-typed templates only generate well-typed object programs.

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“…Moreover, our type system is modular. This is an important step towards Stroustrup's goal of enforcing type safety of C++ programs [33].…”

Section: Checking C++ Templatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early detection of type errors in C++ templates

Chen

Erwig

2014

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

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“…Stroustrup presents [40] a type-safe variant of printf using variadic template functions which are part of the upcoming standard, C++1x [20]. That implementation, originally presented in [9], uses runtime format strings and transforms printf calls to write to C++ streams at runtime.…”

Section: Type-safe Printfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domain-specific language integration with compile-time parser generator library

PorkolabZoltán

SinkovicsÁbel

2010

SIGPLAN Not.

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Smooth integration of domain-specific languages into a general purpose host language requires absorbing of domain code written in arbitrary syntax. The integration should cause minimal syntactical and semantic overhead and introduce minimal dependency on external tools. In this paper we discuss a DSL integration technique for the C++ programming language. The solution is based on compile-time parsing of the DSL code. The parser generator is a C++ template metaprogram reimplementation of a runtime Haskell parser generator library. The full parsing phase is executed when the host program is compiled. The library uses only standard C++ language features, thus our solution is highly portable. As a demonstration of the power of this approach, we present a highly efficient and type-safe version of printf and the way it can be constructed using our library. Despite the well known syntactical difficulties of C++ template metaprograms, building embedded languages using our library leads to self-documenting C++ source code.

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“…It is proved that the physics of the simulation is preserved in the MLMD system: the growth rates of instabilities, such as the two stream [24] and the Weibel instability [25,26], are the ones expected from theory, electron structures in phase space develop correctly and the coarse grid is able to effectively drive the refined grid evolution (Section 6). In Beck et al [27], Parsek2D-MLMD, a pure MPI [28], C++ [29], Object Oriented [30] parallel code is presented. Parsek2D-MLMD is an evolution of Parsek2D [31] implementing the MLMD method.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%