[Colloq] Hiring Talk, Monday, May 1, 11:00AM - Olin Shivers, Georgia Tech

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium
Presents a hiring talk by:
Olin Shivers
Georgia Institute of Technology

Who will speak on:
"What Lambda Calculus has to Offer Network-Protocol Implementors"

Monday, May 1, 2006
11:00am
366 West Village H
Northeastern University


Abstract:
There is a perception of programming languages based on the lambda 
calculus (such as Scheme, SML, and Haskell) that their primary utility 
lies in writing compilers for more languages based on the lambda 
calculus. And there is a certain amount of truth in this perception.

This is unfortunate, because these languages are terrifically 
expressive, and *should* be easing the lives of programmers who 
construct high-performance network-protocol stacks, DSP systems, web 
services and other systems codes.  However, making these languages 
*practical* tools for systems-programming tasks requires developing 
sophisticated analyses that can enable efficient, lightweight 
implementations.

Taming lambda by means of flow analysis is a problem that has kept me, 
and others, happily occupied for over twenty years. In this talk, I will 
describe this arc of work: the early results, their limitations, some 
very recent work addressing these limits, some applications that are 
enabled by this analytic approach and future possibilities that I think 
are worth investigation.

As an example application, I'll describe how these representations and 
analyses can be used to optimize or "fuse" pipelines of on-line 
transducers, a programming paradigm useful to network-protocol stacks, 
DSP systems and so-called "stream processing" systems.

Host: Mitch Wand