Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationDomain-specific languages (DSLs) are increasingly popular, and there are a variety of ways to create a DSL. A DSL designer might write an interpreter from scratch, compile the DSL to another language, express DSL concepts using only the existing forms of an existing language, or implement DSL constructs using a language's extension capabilities, including macros. While extensible languages can offer the easiest opportunity for creating a DSL that takes advantage of the language's existing infrastructure, existing tools for debugging fail to adequately adapt the debugging experience to a given domain. This dissertation addresses the problem of debugging DSLs defined with macros and describes an event-oriented approach that works well with a macro-expansion view of language implementation. It pairs the mapping of DSL terms to host terms with an event mapping to convert primitive events back to domain-specific concepts. Domain-specific events can be further inspected or manipulated to construct domain-specific debuggers. This dissertation presents a core model of evaluation and events and also presents a language design-analogous to pattern-based notations for macros, but in the other direction-for describing how events in a DSL's expansion are mapped to events at the DSL's level. The domain-specific events can enable useful, domain-specific debuggers, and the dissertation introduces a design for a debugging framework to help with debugger construction. To validate the design of the debugging framework, a debugging framework, Ripple, is implemented, and this dissertation demonstrates that with a modest amount of work, Ripple can support building domain-specific debuggers

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI 2015)

The goal of the DSLDI workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in sharing ideas on how DSLs should be designed, implemented, supported by tools, and applied in realistic application contexts. We are both interested in discovering how already known domains such as graph processing or machine learning can be best supported by DSLs, but also in exploring new domains that could be targeted by DSLs. More generally, we are interested in building a community that can drive forward the development of modern DSLs. These informal post-proceedings contain the submitted talk abstracts to the 3rd DSLDI workshop (DSLDI'15), and a summary of the panel discussion on Language Composition

Evolving a DSL implementation

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are small languages designed for use in a specific domain. DSLs typically evolve quite radically throughout their lifetime, but current DSL implementation approaches are often clumsy in the face of such evolution. In this paper I present a case study of an DSL evolving in its syntax, semantics, and robustness, implemented in the Converge language. This shows how real-world DSL implementations can evolve along with changing requirements

Checking-in on Network Functions

When programming network functions, changes within a packet tend to have consequences---side effects which must be accounted for by network programmers or administrators via arbitrary logic and an innate understanding of dependencies. Examples of this include updating checksums when a packet's contents has been modified or adjusting a payload length field of a IPv6 header if another header is added or updated within a packet. While static-typing captures interface specifications and how packet contents should behave, it does not enforce precise invariants around runtime dependencies like the examples above. Instead, during the design phase of network functions, programmers should be given an easier way to specify checks up front, all without having to account for and keep track of these consequences at each and every step during the development cycle. In keeping with this view, we present a unique approach for adding and generating both static checks and dynamic contracts for specifying and checking packet processing operations. We develop our technique within an existing framework called NetBricks and demonstrate how our approach simplifies and checks common dependent packet and header processing logic that other systems take for granted, all without adding much overhead during development.Comment: ANRW 2019 ~ https://irtf.org/anrw/2019/program.htm

Evolving a DSL implementation

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are small languages designed for use in a specific domain. DSLs typically evolve quite radically throughout their lifetime, but current DSL implementation approaches are often clumsy in the face of such evolution. In this paper I present a case study of an DSL evolving in its syntax, semantics, and robustness, implemented in the Converge language. This shows how real-world DSL implementations can evolve along with changing requirements

Parallel machine architecture and compiler design facilities

The objective is to provide an integrated simulation environment for studying and evaluating various issues in designing parallel systems, including machine architectures, parallelizing compiler techniques, and parallel algorithms. The status of Delta project (which objective is to provide a facility to allow rapid prototyping of parallelized compilers that can target toward different machine architectures) is summarized. Included are the surveys of the program manipulation tools developed, the environmental software supporting Delta, and the compiler research projects in which Delta has played a role