Notes from last meeting
Attendees (5): Ben L, Andrae, Josh P, Amos, Erik
Amos: Started at Ghost Locomotion to work on their streaming control system for self driving cars.
Erik: Writing websockets code in Haskell for IOHK.
Erik: Mentions good experience with VSCodium — a version of VSCode with the Microsoft trackers taken out.
Ben / Amos / Andrae: Paper “Smart Contracts as Authorized Production Rules” was accepted to PPDP.
Ben: Reading about Graal / Truffle project which is a framework for building JIT-ting interpreters for JVM. It uses a graphical intermediate language rather than one based around named binders and a-normal form. Thorin is another graph based intermediate language where binding is expressed in the graph structure rather than via binders.
Ben: Discussion of recent Kinds are Calling Conventions paper, a follow up to Types are Calling Conventions. The former provides a functional intermediate representation where eta-conversion transforms are semantically valid (unlike in GHC core). This is done by introducing a new form of function binder (lambda) that introduces "implicit call-by-name evaluation”, meaning that when closures are formed their free variables are automatically substituted for rather than being shared via the closure.
Josh: Recently started on the Tako project
https://github.com/Cypher1/tako which is an experimental language with support for verification with Hoare Logic. Hopefully we’ll get a FP-Syd talk about it soon!