Dynamic Languages Symposium 2007

Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN

Program

Invited Talks

Tradeoffs in Retrofitting Security: An Experience Report
Mark S. Miller (Google Inc.)

In 1973, John Reynold's and James Morris' Gedanken Language retrofit object-capability security into an Algol-like language. Today, there are active projects retrofitting Java, Javascript, Python, Mozart/Oz, OCaml, Perl, and Pict. These represent a variety of approaches, with different tradeoffs regarding legacy compatibility, safety, and expressivity. In this talk I propose a taxonomy of these approaches, and discuss some of the lessons learned to date.

Mark S. Miller is a research scientist at Google, open source coordinator for the E secure distributed programming language, co-creator of the agoric paradigm of market-based computing, and an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system.

Bringing Dynamic Languages to .NET with the DLR
Jim Hugunin (Microsoft Corp.)

From the beginning, Microsoft's .NET framework was designed to support a broad range of different programming languages on a Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides shared services to these languages ranging from a world-class GC and JIT to a sandboxed security model to tools integration for debugging and profiling. Sharing these features has two huge benefits for languages on the CLR. First, it's easier to implement a language because lots of difficult engineering work is already done for you. Second, and more importantly, these languages can seamlessly work together and share libraries and frameworks so that each language can build on the work of the others. The CLR has good support for dynamic languages today. IronPython-1.0 demonstrates this. The new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a small set of key features to the CLR to make it dramatically better. It adds to the platform a set of services designed explicitly for the needs of dynamic languages. These include a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code. With these additional features it becomes dramatically easier to build high-quality dynamic language implementations on .NET. More importantly, these features enable all of the dynamic languages which use the DLR to freely share code with other dynamic languages as well as with the existing powerful static languages on the platform such as VB.NET and C#.

Jim Hugunin is an architect on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) team at Microsoft where he drives work to further improve the support for dynamic languages within the .NET platform - starting with the initial successes of IronPython. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jim worked at Xerox PARC as one of the principal designers of the AspectJ language and tools. Jim is also the creator of Jython, one of the first and still one of the most popular scripting languages for the Java platform.

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Call for papers

The Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal, Canada, is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, and Prolog continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications. DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.

DLS 2007 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the OOPSLA conference companion and the ACM Digital Library.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Innovative language features and implementation techniques
• Development and platform support, tools
• Interesting applications
• Domain-oriented programming
• Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
• Reflection and meta-programming
• Software evolution
• Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
• Dynamic optimization
• Hardware support
• Experience reports and case studies
• Educational approaches and perspectives
• Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming

Submissions and proceedings

We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.

Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls2007/ in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Important dates

• Submission of papers: June 1, 2007 (hard deadline)
• Author notification: June 30, 2007
• Final versions due: July 7, 2007
• DLS 2007: October 22
• OOPSLA 2007: October 21-25

Program chairs

• Pascal Costanza, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
  • pascal.costanza@vub.ac.be
• Robert Hirschfeld, Hasso-Plattner-Institut, University of Potsdam, Germany
  • hirschfeld@hpi.uni-potsdam.de

Program committee

• Gilad Bracha, Cadence Design Systems, USA
• Johan Brichau, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
• William Clinger, Northeastern University, USA
• William Cook, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Pascal Costanza, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (co-chair)
• Stéphane Ducasse, Université de Savoie, France
• Brian Foote, Industrial Logic, USA
• Robert Hirschfeld, Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany (co-chair)
• Jeremy Hylton, Google, USA
• Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University, USA
• Michele Lanza, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Michael Leuschel, Universität Düsseldorf, Germany
• Henry Lieberman, MIT Media Laboratory, USA
• Martin von Löwis, Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany
• Philippe Mougin, OCTO Technology, France
• Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Berne, Switzerland
• Kent Pitman, PTC, USA
• Ian Piumarta, Viewpoints Research Institute, USA
• Nathanael Schärli, Google, Switzerland
• Anton van Straaten, AppSolutions.com, USA
• Dave Thomas, Bedarra Research Labs, Canada
• Dave Ungar, USA
• Allen Wirfs-Brock, Microsoft, USA
• Roel Wuyts, IMEC & Unversité Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium