CAREER: Bridging the Gap Between Prototyping and Production

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Modern software engineering methods improve programmer productivity by taking an incremental approach to software development. Software engineers rapidly develop prototypes and then iteratively refine the prototypes into production systems. However, today's programming systems do not support a smooth transition from prototyping to production. On one hand, scripting languages and interactive environments support prototyping while on the other hand conventional programming languages and optimizing compilers support the development of reusable and efficient production codes. Neither support both prototyping and production, so developers use a mixture of programming systems. This practice incurs many costs such as the impedance mismatch of inter-language data transfers and the time to translate programs between languages.The goal of this research is to discover the scientific principles necessary for a single programming system to effectively support the incremental refinement of prototypes into production software. To accomplish this research objective, classic conflicts between flexibility and safety and between abstraction and performance need to be resolved. To achieve both flexibility and safety, the research will investigate ways to combine dynamic and static type checking, using an approach called gradual typing. To achieve both abstraction and performance, the research will develop a domain-specific compiler for linear algebra and show how show how high-level abstractions can provide greater opportunities for compiler optimization than conventional abstractions such as loops and scalar operations. The broader impacts of the project arise from improvements to programmer productivity and software quality.