UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Fine-grained Language Composition" Dr. Laurence Tratt (Kings College London) 24 February 2016 (Wednesday) 1 pm - 2 pm Hatfield, College Lane Campus Lecture Theatre LF233 Everyone is Welcome to Attend Refreshments will be available Abstract: Programming languages are islands, each disconnected from the rest. We choose a language for a task and, for better or worse, stick with it. Communicating between programs written in different languages is such a slow, arduous, task that we avoid doing it whenever possible. In this talk I will show how language composition can lower, and even remove, the barriers between languages. We have pioneered new approaches to the two major challenges in language composition: editing and running composed programs. Using our novel editor 'Eco', users can write source files that contain fragments of multiple languages. We then run multi-language programs using composed meta-tracing VMs. Our preliminary results suggest that performance of composed programs is often competitive with traditional mono-language VMs. Language composition has several possible uses, and I will conclude by considering how it might be used to allow users to gradually migrate a system from a legacy language to a new language. This is joint work with Edd Barrett, Carl Friedrich Bolz, Lukas Diekmann, Geoff French, and Sarah Mount. More at http://soft-dev.org/ --------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://homepages.herts.ac.uk/~comqcln//colloq/