Collaborative Research: Modular Metaprogramming

协作研究：模块化元编程

• 批准号: 0702717
• 负责人: Andrew Lumsdaine
• 金额: $ 23万
• 依托单位: Indiana University
• 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=0702717&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，许多软件库提供复杂的接口，以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成本并降低了软件重用的好处。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过程中推理程序元数据以及基于此信息自定义库实现的构造，则库可以变得更加通用且更易于使用。当前的编程语言以不成熟的形式提供这些功能，并且编程语言理论的现有技术尚未达到这种功能的组合。研究人员正在推进理论，将类型安全和模块化带入这一背景，并且他们正在与 C++ 标准委员会密切合作，将其结果转移到工业实践中。推理元数据和自定义库所需的语言功能组合称为反射元编程。该领域的先前研究为元编程提供了类型安全性和模块化，但没有为反射元编程提供类型安全性和模块化。研究人员正在通过仔细集成以下各项来研究反射元编程的类型安全性：1）一种元语言，它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）一种用于对类型进行分类的工具；以及 3）一种类型系统，该系统使用依赖类型提供与元语言的挂钩。通过开发更可靠和更具表现力的元编程系统，这项研究提高了软件库的开发人员和用户的程序员生产力，因为模块化类型系统将在开发周期的早期发现更多的错误。