Collaborative Research: Modular Metaprogramming

协作研究：模块化元编程

• 批准号: 0702362
• 负责人: Jeremy Siek
• 金额: $ 34万
• 依托单位: University of Colorado at Boulder
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-07-01 至 2011-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0702362&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Modular; Metaprogramming

Software developers rely on high-quality software libraries to mitigate the cost of building complex applications. However, many software libraries provide complex interfaces to make the library adaptable to application-specific needs. This complexity raises the cost of adoption and reduces the benefits of software reuse. Researchers discovered that libraries can be made more versatile and easier to use if the underlying programming language provides library authors with constructs for reasoning, during the compilation of the application, about program metadata and for customizing the library implementation based on this information. Current programming languages provide these features in an immature form and the state of the art in programming language theory does not yet reach this combination of features. The investigators are advancing the theory to bring type safety and modularity to this context and they are working closely with the C++ Standards Committee to transfer their results to industrial practice.The combination of language features needed to reason about metadata and customize libraries is called reflective metaprogramming. Previous research in this area provides type safety and modularity for metaprogramming but not reflective metaprogramming. The investigators are researching type safety for reflective metaprogramming through a careful integration of 1) a meta-language that provides computation over values and types and that provides reflection over all the program's metadata, 2) a facility for classifying types, and 3) a type system that provides hooks into the meta-language using dependent types. By developing a more reliable and expressive metaprogramming system, this research improves programmer productivity for both the developers and users of software libraries because many more bugs will be caught early in the development cycle by the modular type system.

软件开发人员依靠高质量的软件库来降低构建复杂应用程序的成本。然而，许多软件库提供了复杂的接口，使库能够适应特定于应用程序的需求。这种复杂性增加了采用的成本，并减少了软件重用的好处。研究人员发现，如果底层编程语言为库作者提供了在应用程序编译期间推理程序元数据并基于此信息定制库实现的构造，则库可以变得更加通用和易于使用。当前的编程语言以不成熟的形式提供这些特征，并且编程语言理论的最新技术水平尚未达到这种特征的组合。研究人员正在推进将类型安全和模块化引入这一背景的理论，他们正在与C++标准委员会密切合作，将他们的成果转化为工业实践。推理元数据和定制库所需的语言特性的组合称为反射元编程。以前的研究在这方面提供了类型安全和模块化的元编程，但没有反射元编程。研究人员正在研究反射元编程的类型安全，通过仔细集成1）元语言，提供对值和类型的计算，并提供对所有程序元数据的反射，2）分类类型的设施，以及3）类型系统，使用依赖类型提供到元语言的钩子。通过开发一个更可靠和更有表现力的元编程系统，这项研究提高了程序员的生产力，为开发人员和用户的软件库，因为更多的错误将被捕获的早期开发周期的模块化类型系统。