Boston Lisp Meeting 2013-08-08T18:00

[Alex Plotnick]

I'm pleased to announce that Alexey Radul will present his work on
the "DysVunctional Language" and its compiler at the next Boston Lisp
meeting. The meeting will take place on Thursday, 8 August at 6:00 PM,
in the Star Conference room at MIT's Stata Center (MIT 32-D463;
<http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32>).

Abstract:
The "Sufficiently Clever Compiler" has become something of a trope in
the Lisp community: the mythical beast that promises language and
interface designers near-unlimited freedom, and leaves their output in
a performance lurch by its non-appearance.  A few years ago, I was
young enough to join a research project to build one of these things.
Neglecting a raft of asterisks, footnotes, and caveats, we ended up
making something whose essence is pretty impressive: you pay for
abstraction boundaries in compile-time resources, but they end up free
at runtime.  The prototype was just open-sourced recently, so that
makes a good occasion to talk about it.

Bio:
Alexey Radul earned his PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 2009.  His research interests focus on
programming languages, compilers, high-performance computing, and how
advances in the design and implementation of programming languages can
enable novel applications by expanding the complexity horizon.