Mathias Ricken

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Concutest: A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs

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COMP 410 - Software Engineering Methodology

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A Concurrent Affair

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In the spring of 2009, I started working with Dr. Walid Taha's research group on a multi-stage programming extension of Java. We developed an implementation, called Mint, wrote a technical report and published a paper (PDF) at PLDI 2010.

Abstract

Multi-stage programming (MSP) provides a disciplined approach to run-time code generation. In the purely functional setting, it has been shown how MSP can be used to reduce the overhead of abstractions, allowing clean, maintainable code without paying performance penalties. Unfortunately, MSP is difcult to combine with imperative features, which are prevalent in mainstream languages. The central difculty is scope extrusion, wherein free variables can inadvertently be moved outside the scopes of their binders. This paper proposes a new approach to combining MSP with imperative features that occupies a "sweet spot" in the design space in terms of how well useful MSP applications can be expressed and how easy it is for programmers to understand. The key insight is that escapes (or "anti-quotes") must be weakly separable from the rest of the code, i.e. the computational effects occurring inside an escape that are visible outside the escape are guaranteed to not contain code. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we formalize a type system based on Lightweight Java which we prove sound, and we also provide an implementation, called Mint, to validate both the expressivity of the system and the performance gains attainable by using MSP in this setting.

Westbrook, E., M. Ricken, J. Inoue, Y. Yao, T. Abdelatif, and W. Taha

In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, ACM 2010

Download

Publications and the implementation are available below:

• PLDI 2010 Paper:
  Mint: Java Multi-stage Programming Using Weak Separability
  (PDF, view embedded pdf)
  
• GPCE 2010 Tutorial Lecture:
  Agile and Efficient Domain-Specific Languages using Multi-stage Programming in Java Mint
  (PowerPoint, PDF, view embedded pdf)
  Source code for tutorial (ZIP file)
  Tutorial proposal and abstract (PDF, view embedded)
  Practice talk for the COMP 600 seminar, September 20, 2010 (Presentation, PowerPoint, PDF, view embedded)
  Practice talk for the Habanero Research Group, September 24, 2010 (Presentation, PowerPoint, PDF, view embedded)
  
• Mint: A Multi-stage Extension of Java (Presentation, PowerPoint, PDF, view embedded):
  Mathias Ricken's presentation in the Computer Science Colloquia at Purdue University, March 15, 2010.
• Mint: A Multi-stage Extension of Java (Presentation, PowerPoint, PDF, view embedded):
  Mathias Ricken's presentation for the COMP 600 seminar, February 8, 2010.
  Video recording of the presentation (requires Flash)
• Technical Report:
  Multi-stage Programming for Mainstream Languages (TR09-02)
  (local mirror , view embedded pdf)
  
• Implementation:
  Java Mint: A Multi-stage Extension of Java
  Local mirror: latest version is JavaMint-r15952
  tar.gz source + binaries
  zip binaries only
   
• DrJava IDE with Integrated Mint: latest version is drjava-r5403-mint-r15952
  DrJava with Mint (This is probably the simplest way to experiment with Mint.)
  
   
• Direct access to local mirror directory

Resources

Here are some useful resources for Mint:

• The Java Mint Blog
• Java Mint Implementation