ColloquiaWalid Taha, Yale University - March 27th

[Margery Ishmael]

Wednesday, March 27, 2002
2:30 pm - Ryerson 251
Walid Taha, Yale University

"Towards Better Language Support for Resource Aware Programming (RAP)"

Abstract: As embedded systems play an increasingly important role in our 
daily life, demand for technologies that can help enhance the reliability 
of such systems will continue to grow. This talk examines why traditional 
high-level programming languages can be inappropriate for such 
applications, and introduces the idea of resource-aware programming (RAP) 
languages.  The key feature of these languages is that they have a clear 
underlying cost model, and that the programmer has finer control over 
various interesting notions of resources.  We review two very different 
examples of RAP languages: Multi-stage languages (such as MetaML and 
MetaOCaml), and resource-bounded functional reactive programming (FRP) 
languages such as RT-FRP and E-FRP).

In addition to having the usual constructs of a general-purpose language, 
multi-stage languages have constructs that allow fine control over 
evaluation order.  These constructs allow us to break down a computation 
and allow us to execute various stages on various platforms.  In addition, 
these constructs can be also viewed as internalizing the notions of runtime 
program generation and execution.  This means they also provide the 
programmer with the essence of partial evaluation and program 
specialization techniques, both of which have been shown to lead to 
dramatic resource-utilization gains in a wide range of applications, 
starting from implementations of domain-specific compilers, to 
high-performance operating systems.  Multi-stage languages make it possible 
to write generic and highly-parameterized programs that do not pay 
unnecessary runtime overheads.

More recently, I have been involved in the development of two resource 
bounded languages called RT-FRP and E-FRP.  While these languages cannot be 
used to achieve the same performance gains as multi-stage languages, they 
provide another important example of resource awareness: all programs 
written in these languages use finite resources.  These languages have been 
given formal semantics, are compiled to generate C code for an embedded 
system, and have been used to program small robots developed at Yale 
University.

Bio: Walid received his Bacherlors degree from Kuwait University in 
1992.  He received his Doctoral degree from Oregon Graduate Institute in 
1999.  After a one year post-doctoral post at Chalmers University (Sweden), 
he accepted a research faculty position at Yale University (November 2000), 
and has been there since then.  Walid is currently the principal 
investigator on an NSF ITR grant entitled "Putting Multi-Stage Annotations 
to Work", and is the general chair of the First International ACM 
SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generators and Components (GCSE/SAIG '02).

Host: David MacQueen

*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*
Persons with disabilities who may need assistance should call 773.834.8977


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Margery Ishmael
Secretary to the Chairman, Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
1100 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL. 60637-1581
tel. 773.834.8977  fax. 773.702.8487
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