An Overview of ALIA4J - An Execution Model for Advanced-Dispatching Languages

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Christoph Bockisch

DATE: Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-006, Black building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 14.30

ABSTRACT:
New programming languages that allow to reduce the complexity of software solutions are frequently developed, often as extensions of existing languages. Many implementations thus resort to transforming the extension's source code to the imperative intermediate representation of the parent language. But approaches like compiler frameworks only allow for re-use of code transformations for syntactically-related languages; they do not allow for re-use across language families. The ALIA4J approach brings such re-use to language families with advanced dispatching mechanisms like point cut-advice or predicate dispatching. It introduces a meta-model of dispatching as a rich, extensible intermediate language. By implementing language constructs from four languages as refinements of this meta-model, we show that a significant amount of them can be re-used across language families. Another building block of ALIA4J is a framework for execution environments that automatically derives an execution model of the program's dispatching from representations in our intermediate language. This model enables different execution strategies for dispatching; we have validated this by implementing three execution environments whose strategies range from interpretation to optimizing code generation.

BIO:
Christoph Bockisch is an assistant professor on Software Composition at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. His research focus is on the design and implementation of programming languages with advanced dispatch mechanisms. He develops and maintains the ALIA4J project allowing to define arbitrary dispatch mechanisms by means of a meta-model that acts as a first-class representation of these mechanisms. He received his doctoral degree from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2008. He authored and co-authored several papers about programming languages published amongst others by the ECOOP, OOPSLA, AOSD, TOOLS, and VEE conferences. Christoph is co-organizer and co-founder of the workshop series "Virtual Machines Intermediate Languages" and "Free Composition", and he was program co-chair of the AOSD-Europe Summer School 2009. Christoph was/is reviewer for the TAOSD, TSE, and SoSym journals, member of the program committees of the workshop "Variability & Composition"

2011 and the ODAL workshop 2006, and supporting reviewer for the conferences Compiler Construction, AOSD, and ECOOP and for the TOSEM journal. Christoph was and continues to be involved in teaching courses to graduate students about aspect-oriented software development and programming language concepts.

HOST: Prof. Walter Binder