Write a Blog >>
Tue 19 Jan 2016 17:20 - 17:40 at Room Harbor View - Staging Chair(s): Jacques Carette

Staging is a program generation paradigm with a clean, well-investigated semantics which statically ensures that the generated code is always well-typed and well-scoped. Staging is often used for specializing programs to the known properties or parts of data to improve efficiency, but so far it has been limited to generating terms. This short paper describes our ongoing work on extending staging, with its strong safety guarantees, to generation of non-terms, focusing on ML-style modules. The purpose is to map out the promises and challenges, then to pose a question to solicit the community's expertise in evaluating how essential our extensions are for the purpose of applying staging beyond the realm of terms. We demonstrate our extensions' use in specializing functor applications to eliminate its (currently large) overhead in OCaml. We explain the challenges that those extensions bring in and identify a promising line of attack. Unexpectedly, however, it turns out that we can avoid module generation altogether by representing modules, possibly containing abstract types, as polymorphic records. With the help of first-class modules, module specialization reduces to ordinary term specialization, which can be done with conventional staging. The extent to which this hack generalizes is unclear. Thus we have a question to the community: is there a compelling use case for module generation? With these insights and questions, we offer a starting point for a long-term program in the next stage of staging research.

Tue 19 Jan

Displayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change

16:00 - 17:40
StagingPEPM at Room Harbor View
Chair(s): Jacques Carette McMaster University
16:00
30m
Talk
Staging Generic Programming
PEPM
Jeremy Yallop University of Cambridge, UK
DOI
16:30
30m
Talk
Removing Runtime Overhead for Optimized Object Queries
PEPM
Jon Brandvein , Y. Annie Liu Stony Brook University, USA
DOI
17:00
20m
Talk
Toward Introducing Binding-Time Analysis to MetaOCaml
PEPM
Kenichi Asai Ochanomizu University
DOI
17:20
20m
Talk
Staging beyond Terms: Prospects and Challenges
PEPM
Jun Inoue National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan, Oleg Kiselyov , Yukiyoshi Kameyama
DOI