[PRL] Torture chamber 10/15 at noon WVH 366 Abstracting Abstract Control at DLS 2014

[J. Ian Johnson]

Hey folks, I have a 20 minute slot at DLS to talk about a really technical paper, so the talk is almost all jokes, hand waving, and BS. Come torture me!

Title: Abstracting Abstract Control
Speaker: J. Ian Johnson
Abstract:
The strength of a dynamic language is also its weakness: run-time
flexibility comes at the cost of compile-time predictability.
Many of the hallmarks of dynamic languages such as closures,
continuations, various forms of reflection, and a lack of static types
make many programmers rejoice, while compiler writers, tool
developers, and verification engineers lament.
The dynamism of these features simply confounds statically reasoning
about programs that use them.
Consequently, static analyses for dynamic languages are few, far
between, and seldom sound.

The ``abstracting abstract machines'' (AAM) approach to constructing
static analyses has recently been proposed as a method to ameliorate
the difficulty of designing analyses for such language features.
The technique is broader, richer and more widely applicable than first thought.
This talk is about our foray into bigger and better abstractions for tighter
predictions on rich control structure in our dynamic languages.