Boston Lisp 2018-11-02 Marc Feeley: Compiling for Multi-language Task Migration

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

The Boston Lisp Meeting Returns
on Friday November 2nd 2018 at 7pm
at the MIT Stata Center
Star Conference Room 32-D463

Marc Feeley
Professor at Université de Montréal
Author of Gambit Scheme
will visit us and give a talk on

Compiling for Multi-language Task Migration

Task migration allows a running program to continue its execution in a different destination environment. Increasingly, execution environments are defined by combinations of cultural and technological constraints, affecting the choice of host language, libraries and tools. A compiler supporting multiple target environments and task migration must be able to serialize continuations and then deserialize and continue their execution, ideally, even when the language of the destination environment is different.

In this talk, I will describe a compilation approach based on a virtual machine that strikes a balance between implementation portability and efficiency. This approach is implemented in the Gambit Scheme compiler and it targets JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby and Java—some of the most popular host languages for web applications. Experiments show that it compares well with other Scheme compilers targeting high-level languages in terms of execution speed, being sometimes up to 3 orders of magnitude faster.

All details on https://j.mp/BostonLisp
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