Sun, 25 Jul 2010

FP-Syd #26.

On Thursday July 15th, we held the 26th meeting of the Sydney Functional Programming group. The meeting was held at Google's Sydney offices and we had 18 people show up to hear our two presenters.

First up we had your correspondent (thats me) with a presentation titled An LLVM Backend for DDC. This presentation covered the problems with the current C backend, gave a description of LLVM, the options for using LLVM from Haskell, why the LLVM code from GHC was chosen and how if fits into the DDC compile pipeline. Finally I demoed the very wonderful LLVM CGI script which allows you to enter a small C program and view the LLVM output.

Our second presenter for the evening was Eric Willigers who presented on the subject of the ATS programming langauge. ATS is interesting because it offers functional programming with an advanced type system with things like dependent types and linear types but has excellent performance as shown on the Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Eric was able to demonstrate dependent types on a couple of list operations which certainly showed some of the promise of dependent types. ATS certainly does seem interesting but also seems to lack quite a bit of polish.

A big thanks to Eric for presenting and Google for providing the meeting venue and refreshments.

Posted at: 22:11 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink