CITI Talk: “​​Challenges of a Reflective Platform”, by Stéphane Ducasse, on 24th November

The next CITI talk will take place on 24th November at 11 am in Amphi Chappe.

This talk entitled “Challenges of a Reflective Platform” will be presented by Stéphane Ducasse directeur de recherche at Inria-Lille..

Abstract

Pharo is a live programming reflective dynamic language and environment. His tools are delivering an excellent programmer experience and are heavy user of its reflective abilities.
In this talk we will present briefly Pharo an immersive reflective platform and programming language (www.pharo.org) and focused on:
(1) the problems we encounter daily (how to update core libraries while they are used to execute the updater itself, how can we get VM execution benefit from hot state right at system startup and without warming up, how can we isolate reflective parts of the system, what are the code representations we need to make happy the VMs and IDE)
(2) the infrastructure that we would like to have: since we are able to bootstrap the core of the system under 80 k, we can start thinking about multiple versions of the system coexisting, the question of the memory model is then important. Another question is how can we build a system where users can decide when they want to move code from one version to the other ones. Similarly, we would like to resume work on PharoNoOS and work on Xen hypervisor to gain benefit of hot hotspot and fast boot time.

Speaker biography

Stéphane is directeur de recherche at Inria. He has more than 20 years of experience in software maintenance. He leads the RMoD (rmod.lille.inria.fr) team. He is expert in two domains: object-oriented language design and reengineering.  He worked on traits, composable groups of methods. Traits have been introduced in  Pharo, Perl, PHP and  under a variant into Scala, Fortress of SUN Microsystems.  He is also expert on software quality, program understanding, program visualizations, reengineering and metamodeling. He is one of the developer of Moose, an open-source software analysis platform www.moosetechnology.org.  He created www.synectique.eu a company building dedicated tools for advanced software analysis. He is one of the visionary core developers behind Pharo www.pharo.org a new exciting reflective and immersive dynamically-typed language. According to google, his h-index is 49 for about 10 K citations. He is writing some new books around Pharo and having fun building a great and exciting system.