From its beginning 15 years ago, gradual typing is now part of everyday development practice for massive code bases at companies from Facebook to Microsoft to Stripe to Dropbox, all of which have developed their own gradual type systems. In this post, we cover the goals of gradual typing, why it’s had such an impact already, and what remains to be accomplished.
We sometimes think of the number of passes in a compiler as a measure of the compiler’s complexity. But what if we could make compiler development more approachable by fully embracing the idea that a compiler should be structured as a large number of small passes, each performing a single specific task?
*Secure compilation* is an emerging field that puts together advances in programming languages, security, compilers, systems, formal verification, and hardware architectures. It aims to devise compilation chains that eliminate many of today’s security attacks, without sacrificing efficiency, and allowing sound reasoning about security properties in the source language.
SIGPLAN organizes conferences, funds travel for students, and gives awards in the area of programming languages.
On May 27, 2019, Laurie Hendren, Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, Montreal, passed away after a long illness. She leaves her daughter Jane and husband Prakash Panangaden. Laurie shared the Sable Lab with Clark Verbrugge.
