Next Sydney PLT meeting is on Tuesday 4th June (Next Week)

[Ben Lippmeier]

Various programming languages diaspora are meeting monthly on Tuesday evenings, two weeks after FP-Syd. This is an informal gathering and discussion without pre-prepared talks. All interested parties are welcome. 

Current projects include:

Salt: The compilation target that functional programmers always wanted. Salt is what you get when you leave C out in the sun for too long. Now comes with a partially baked VSCode language server plugin. Repo is at https://github.com/discus-lang/salt

Discus: An experimental dialect of Haskell that investigates static typing and program transformation in the presence of computational effects. DDC is the compiler for it. More info at http://discus-lang.org/

Accelerate: An embedded language for accelerated array processing on GPGPUs. More info at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate.

If any of the attendees have another project they want publicised then reply to this mail, or let me know for next month and I’ll include it.

Venue:

The Local Taphouse

122 Flinders St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
7pm Tuesday, 4th June 2019

If you arrive and can’t find us then call Ben Lippmeier +61 421 381 880.

Cheers,

Ben.

Notes from last meeting

Attendees (7): Ben L, Erik, Josh, Amos, Pete, Ben S, Bartosz

Josh: recently joined IOHK along with Erik, currently working on upstreaming patches for Cabal.

Ben L + Amos: submitted paper “Smart Contracts as Authorized Production Rules”. Uses a Petri-net model to describe financial workflows. Pete mentions that standard Petri-nets are not compositional, though there is existing work to compile process calculi like CSP/CCS to Petri-nets. The paper discusses aspects of privacy in smart contract systems. Erik mentions that a tweaked version of the IOHK Crypsonos PoS protocol also allows for some anonymity. 

Bartosz: giving a talk later in the week at MQ about understanding Haskell-style lens libraries in a categorial setting. Mentions that nLab is a helpful online resource for category theory concepts.

Amos: testing of state machines using the Hedgehog framework can be very verbose, particularly to differentiate between statically known and dynamically known variables.

Erik: mentions American Fuzzy Lop (ALP) fuzz testing library for C. Has a very high execution rate. Wraps GCC and G++ to instrument code, and has a genetic algorithm to find new paths through the program. The namesake is also a real sort of rabbit.