[Colloq] PhD Defense: Title: The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Gradual Type System for Dynamic Class Composition | Asumu Takikawa | 3/17/16 1pm 440 Egan

[Walker, Lashauna]

Thursday March 17, 2016 1 PM in 440 Egan

Title: The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Gradual Type System for Dynamic Class Composition
Speaker: Asumu Takikawa

Abstract:

Dynamically-typed programming languages are popular and widely-used, but their lack of static type guidance may hamper program maintenance. As a result, language designers have sought to augment dynamically-typed languages with static type-checking for several decades. Gradual typing has emerged at the forefront of these efforts, allowing programmers to add type annotations to existing untyped programs in a piecemeal fashion. These annotations are checked statically and translated to dynamic checks at the boundaries between typed and untyped code to ensure sound interoperation.

Despite the abundance of publications on gradual typing, several roadblocks still remain that prevent its adoption in practice. First, gradual type systems lack the expressivity to support the flexible object-oriented patterns, especially mixins expressed with first-class classes, that are used in dynamically-typed languages. Second, the dynamic checks that are installed for sound interoperation often slow down the program. Worse yet, no systematic evaluation method exists for these gradual typing overheads.

I present an expressive design of a gradual type system for object-oriented programming and introduce an effective method for the systematic evaluation of its performance characteristics.

Committee:

Matthias Felleisen, Northeastern University Kathleen Fisher, Tufts University Jan Vitek, Northeastern University Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Indiana University Mitchell Wand, Northeastern University


Thank You.

LaShauna Walker
Events and Administrative Specialist
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
617-373-2763
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