[Pl-seminar] Amendment: 9/29 Seminar: Philipp Haller, LaCasa: Lightweight Affinity and Object Capabilities in Scala

[Daniel Patterson]

Host is Heather Miller.

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 1:49 AM, Daniel Patterson <dbp at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:

> NUPRL Seminar presents
>
> Philipp Haller
> KTH Royal Institute of Technology
>
>
> 12:30--1:30pm
> Thursday, Sept. 29 2016
> Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)
>
> LaCasa: Lightweight Affinity and Object Capabilities in Scala
>
> Abstract:
> Aliasing is a known source of challenges in the context of imperative
> object-oriented languages, which have led to important advances in type
> systems for aliasing control. However, their large-scale adoption has
> turned out to be a surprisingly difficult challenge. While new language
> designs show promise, they do not address the need of aliasing control in
> existing languages.
>
> This paper presents a new approach to isolation and uniqueness in an
> existing, widely-used language, Scala. The approach is unique in the way it
> addresses some of the most important obstacles to the adoption of type
> system extensions for aliasing control. First, adaptation of existing code
> requires only a minimal set of annotations. Only a single bit of
> information is required per class. Surprisingly, the paper shows that this
> information can be provided by the object-capability discipline,
> widely-used in program security. We formalize our approach as a type system
> and prove key soundness theorems. The type system is implemented for the
> full Scala language, providing, for the first time, a sound integration
> with Scala’s local type inference. Finally, we empirically evaluate the
> conformity of existing Scala open-source code on a corpus of over 75,000
> LOC.
>
> Bio:
> Philipp Haller is an assistant professor in the theoretical computer
> science group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the leading technical
> university in Sweden. His main research interests are programming
> languages, type systems, concurrent, and distributed programming. Philipp
> is co-author of Scala's async/await extension for asynchronous
> computations, and one of the lead designers of Scala's futures and promises
> library. As main author of the book "Actors in Scala," he created Scala's
> first widely-used actors library. Philipp was co-chair of the 2013 and 2014
> editions of the Scala Workshop, and co-chair of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Scala
> Symposium. Previously, he has held positions at Typesafe, Stanford
> University, and EPFL. He received a PhD in computer science from EPFL in
> 2010.
>
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