[Pl-seminar] 10/20 Seminar: Ming-Ho Yee, Implementing a Functional Language for Flix

[Daniel Patterson]

NUPRL Seminar presents

Ming-Ho Yee
Northeastern University

12:00pm-1:30pm
Thursday, Oct. 20 2016
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Implementing a Functional Language for Flix

Abstract

Static program analysis is a powerful technique for maintaining software,
with applications such as compiler optimizations, code refactoring, and bug
finding. Static analyzers are typically implemented in general-purpose
programming languages, such as C++ and Java; however, these analyzers are
complex and often difficult to understand and maintain. An alternate
approach is to use Datalog, a declarative language. Implementors can
express analysis constraints declaratively, which makes it easier to
understand and ensure correctness of the analysis. Furthermore, the
declarative nature of the analysis allows multiple, independent analyses to
be easily combined.

Flix is a programming language for static analysis, consisting of a logic
language and a functional language. The logic language is inspired by
Datalog, but supports user-defined lattices. The functional language allows
implementors to write functions, something which is not supported in
Datalog. These two extensions, user-defined lattices and functions, allow
Flix to support analyses that cannot be expressed by Datalog, such as a
constant propagation analysis. Datalog is limited to constraints on
relations, and although it can simulate finite lattices, it cannot express
lattices over an infinite domain. Finally, another advantage of Flix is
that it supports interoperability with existing tools written in
general-purpose programming languages.

This talk provides an overview of the implementation and evaluation of the
Flix functional language. The implementation involves abstract syntax tree
transformations, an interpreter back-end, and a code generator back-end,
and must support a number of interesting language features, such as pattern
matching, first-class functions, and interoperability. The evaluation
compares the interpreter and code generator back-ends in terms of
correctness and performance.

Bio

Ming-Ho Yee is a Ph.D. student at Northeastern University. He works on
programming language design and implementation with Jan Vitek. He received
a Bachelor of Software Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and
then continued for a Master of Mathematics in Computer Science under the
supervision of Ondřej Lhoták.
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