[Pl-seminar] 2/6 Seminar: Andrei Alexandrescu: Design by Introspection using the D Language

[Daniel Patterson]

NOTE: This semester, our regular seminar time is Tuesday at 11:45AM.

NUPRL Seminar Presents

Andrei Alexandrescu
D Language Foundation

11:45AM
Tuesday, February 6th, 2018
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Design by Introspection using the D Language

Abstract

Years ago, D started modestly as an improved offering in the realm of
systems programming languages, sharing a good deal of philosophy with C
and C++. With time, however, D became a very distinct language with
unique features (and, of course, its own mistakes).

One angle of particular interest has been D's ability to perform
compile-time introspection. Artifacts in a D program can be "looked at"
during compilation. Coupled with a full-featured compile-time evaluation
engine and with an ability to generate arbitrary code during
compilation, this has led to a number of interesting applications.

This talk shares early experience with using these features of the D
language. Design by Introspection is a proposed programming paradigm
that assembles designs by performing introspection on components during
compilation.

Bio

Andrei Alexandrescu is a researcher, software engineer, and author. He
wrote three best-selling books on programming (Modern C++ Design, C++
Coding Standards, and The D Programming Language) and numerous articles
and papers on wide-ranging topics from programming to language design to
Machine Learning to Natural Language Processing. Andrei holds a PhD in
Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BSc in
Electrical Engineering from University "Politehnica" Bucharest. He
currently works on the D Language Foundation. http://erdani.com