La politique extérieure de M. Wilson

Ennals David. La politique extérieure de M. Wilson. In: Politique étrangère, n°4 - 1964 - 29ᵉannée. pp. 370-379

User-Friendly Functional Programming for Web Mashups

MashMaker is a web-based tool that makes it easy for normal users to create mashups from live data on the internet. Users can query, combine, and explore data, using an interface inspired by spreadsheets and web browsers. Like a spreadsheet, MashMaker mixes program and data and allows ad-hoc unstructured editing of programs. Like a web browser, MashMaker allows users to find the information they are interested in by browsing, rather than writing code, and allows users to bookmark interesting things they find, forming new widgets — reusable mashup fragments. MashMaker is also a modern functional programming language with non-side effecting expressions, higher order functions, and lazy evaluation. We argue that a functional language provides an excellent model to allow users to easily create mashups from web data. In order to cope with this unusual domain, MashMaker contains a number of deviations from normal functional programming languages. Data is live, programs are mixed with data, map and fold operations are described using direct manipulation of data, data is structured like a file-system, and it is possible to write a program largely by browsing around, without having to type or decide in advance what one wants to do

Storage Management

We present HeapSafe, a tool that uses reference counting to dynamically verify the soundness of manual memory management of C programs. HeapSafe relies on a simple extension to the usual malloc/free memory management API: delayed free scopes during which otherwise dangling references can exist. Porting programs for use with HeapSafe typically requires little effort (on average 0.6 % of lines change), adds an average 11 % time overhead (84 % in the worst case), and increases space usage by an average of 13%. These results are based on porting over half a million lines of C code, including perl where we found six previously unknown bugs. Many existing C programs continue to use unchecked manual memory management. One reason is that programmers fear that moving to garbage collection is too big a risk. We believe that HeapSafe is a practical way to provide safe memory management for such programs. Since HeapSafe checks existing memory management rather than changing it, programmers need not worry that HeapSafe will introduce new bugs; and, since HeapSafe does not manage memory itself, programmers can choose to deploy their programs without HeapSafe if performance is critical (a simple header file allows HeapSafe programs to compile and run with a regular C compiler). In contrast, we found that garbage collection, although faster, had much higher space overhead, and occasionally caused a space-usage explosion that made the program unusable