Cited By
View all- Bartha SCheney JBelle V(2021)One down, 699 to go: or, synthesising compositional desugaringsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34854995:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
Slimming languages by reducing sugar: a case for semantics-altering transformations
Pages 90 - 106
Abstract
Splitting a language into a core language and a desugaring function makes it possible to produce tractable semantics for real-world languages. It does so by pushing much of the language's complexity into desugaring. This, however, produces large and unwieldy core programs, which has proven to be a significant obstacle to actual use of these semantics. In this paper we analyze this problem for a semantics of JavaScript. We show that much of the bloat is *semantic bloat*: a consequence of the language's rich semantics. We demonstrate how assumptions about language use can confine this bloat, and codify these through several transformations that, in general, do not preserve the language's semantics. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of these transformations. Finally, we discuss the implications of this work on language design and structure.
References
[1]
G. Bernhardt. Wat. A lightning talk from CodeMash, 2012. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat.
[2]
S. Bishop, M. Fairbairn, M. Norrish, P. Sewell, M. Smith, and K. Wansbrough. Rigorous specification and conformance testing techniques for network protocols, as applied to TCP, UDP, and sockets. In Special Interest Group on Data Communications, 2005.
[3]
M. Bodin, A. Chargéraud, D. Filaretti, P. Gardner, S. Maffeis, D. Naudˇzi¯unien˙e, A. Schmitt, and G. Smith. A trusted mechanised JavaScript specification. In Principles of Programming Languages, 2014.
[4]
R. Bruce Findler, J. Clements, C. Flanagan, M. Flatt, K. Shriram, P. Steckler, and M. Felleisen. DrScheme: A programming environment for scheme. Journal of Functional Programming, 12:159–182, 2002.
[5]
R. C. Holt and D. B. Wortman. A sequence of structured subsets of PL/I*. In Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, 1974.
[6]
S. Chang. Laziness by need. In European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems, 2013.
[7]
D. Crockford. JavaScript: The Good Parts. O’Reilly Media, 2008.
[8]
ECMA International. ECMAScript Language test262. http://test262.ecmascript.org/.
[9]
ECMA International. ECMAScript Edition 5.1, 2011. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/ files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-262.pdf.
[10]
M. Felleisen, R. B. Findler, M. Flatt, and S. Krishnamurthi. How to Design Programs. MIT Press, 2001.
[11]
D. Filaretti and S. Maffeis. An executable formal semantics of PHP. In European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, 2014.
[12]
Google Chrome V8 development team. Experiments with strengthening JavaScript, 2015.
[13]
https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments.
[14]
A. Guha, C. Saftoiu, and S. Krishnamurthi. The essence of JavaScript. In European Conference on Object-oriented Programming, 2010.
[15]
A. Guha, C. Saftoiu, and S. Krishnamurthi. Typing local control and state using flow analysis. In European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems, 2011.
[16]
J. K. Ousterhout. Scripting: Higher level programming for the 21st century. IEEE Computer Magazine, 31:23–30, Mar. 1998.
[17]
S. Krishnamurthi and J. Vitek. Viewpoint: The real software crisis: Repeatability as a core value. Communications of the ACM, 58(3):34–36, Mar. 2015.
[18]
P. J. Landin. The mechanical evaluation of expressions. The Computer Journal, 6(4):308–320, 1964.
[19]
B. S. Lerner, M. J. Carroll, D. P. Kimmel, H. Q. la Vallee, and S. Krishnamurthi. Modeling and reasoning about DOM events. In USENIX Conference on Web Application Development, June 2012.
[20]
S. Maffeis and A. Taly. Language-based isolation of untrusted JavaScript. In Computer Security Foundations Symposium, 2009.
[21]
J. Matthews and R. Bruce Findler. Operational semantics for multi-language programs. Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 31(12), 2009.
[22]
R. Milner, R. Harper, D. MacQueen, and M. Tofte. The Definition of Standard ML, revised edition. The MIT Press, 1990.
[23]
J. G. Politz, M. Carroll, B. S. Lerner, J. Pombrio, and S. Krishnamurthi. A tested semantics for getters, setters, and eval in JavaScript. In Dynamic Languages Symposium, 2012.
[24]
J. G. Politz, A. Martinez, M. Milano, S. Warren, D. Patterson, J. Li, A. Chitipothu, and S. Krishnamurthi. Python: The full monty: A tested semantics for the python programming language. In ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications, 2013.
[25]
J. Regehr, Y. Chen, P. Cuoq, E. Eide, C. Ellison, and X. Yang. Test-case reduction for C compiler bugs. In Programming Languages Design and Implementation, 2012.
[26]
A. Sampson, W. Dietl, E. Fortuna, D. Gnanapragasam, L. Ceze, and D. Grossman. EnerJ: Approximate data types for safe and general low-power computation. In Programming Languages Design and Implementation, 2011.
[27]
P. Sewell and S. Zdancewic. Principles in Practice (PiP), 2014. Co-located with Principles of Programming Languages.
[28]
E. Tilevich and Y. Smaragdakis. J-Orchestra: Enhancing Java programs with distribution capabilities. Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 19(1):1–40, 2009.
[29]
E. M. Westbrook and S. Chaudhuri. A semantics for approximate program transformations. CoRR, abs/1304.5531, 2013.
[30]
X. Zhang, L. Koved, M. Pistoia, S. Weber, T. Jaeger, G. Marceau, and L. Zeng. The case for analysis preserving language transformation. In International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, 2006.
Index Terms
- Slimming languages by reducing sugar: a case for semantics-altering transformations
Recommendations
Layout-sensitive language extensibility with SugarHaskell
Haskell '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Haskell SymposiumProgrammers need convenient syntax to write elegant and concise programs. Consequently, the Haskell standard provides syntactic sugar for some scenarios (e.g., do notation for monadic code), authors of Haskell compilers provide syntactic sugar for more ...
Layout-sensitive language extensibility with SugarHaskell
Haskell '12Programmers need convenient syntax to write elegant and concise programs. Consequently, the Haskell standard provides syntactic sugar for some scenarios (e.g., do notation for monadic code), authors of Haskell compilers provide syntactic sugar for more ...
Inferring scope through syntactic sugar
Many languages use syntactic sugar to define parts of their surface language in terms of a smaller core. Thus some properties of the surface language, like its scoping rules, are not immediately evident. Nevertheless, IDEs, refactorers, and other tools ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
October 2015
307 pages
Copyright © 2015 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 21 October 2015
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Funding Sources
Conference
SPLASH '15
Sponsor:
SPLASH '15: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity
October 25 - 30, 2015
PA, Pittsburgh, USA
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 40 of 105 submissions, 38%
Upcoming Conference
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- View Citations1Total Citations
- 108Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)8
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 13 Dec 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
Cited By
View all- Bartha SCheney JBelle V(2021)One down, 699 to go: or, synthesising compositional desugaringsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34854995:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in