Last year, I was asked to give a talk for the Meta’19 workshop. It’s a workshop on metaprogramming and reflection. The submission deadline for this year’s edition, is less than a month away: Check it out!
Last September, I had a lot of fun putting together a lecture on language implementation techniques. It is something I wanted to do for a while, but I had not had a good excuse before to actually do it.
SOM, the Simple Object Machine, is a little dynamic language designed for teaching object-oriented virtual machine design. It originates in Aarhus, Denmark, and according to Lars Bak, it was implemented in the course of two days by Kasper Lund. They used it back in 2001 for a course at the University of Aarhus.
Today at FOSDEM, I gave a brief talk on implementing SOM, a little Smalltalk, with RPython and Truffle. RPython, probably best known for the PyPy implementation, uses meta-tracing JIT compilation to make simple interpreters fast. Truffle, a research project of Oracle Lab, is an approach for building self-optimizing interpreters and in combination with Graal, it gives a JIT compiler for AST-like interpreters. In the talk, I briefly sketch both of them, without going into many details.
Today, FOSDEM featured that first incarnation of a Smalltalk developer room. Unfortunately, FOSDEM is always packed with interesting talks, so, I only managed to attend a couple of talks. Most notably the talk on Spoon.
Today, I gave a presentation on Traits for PHP in Paris. It was a quite interesting audience, ca. 35 professional PHP developers and all interested in Traits.
On the first day here at the summer school, the organizers gave us the opportunity to present our research ideas to the lecturers and other participants.