ECOOP day 3

The day kicked off with Erik Ernst's invited talk: there was some philosophising, but mostly it was about virtual classes and gbeta ("the nomination for best foreign programming language syntax goes to..."). I very much approve of virtual classes --- they are awesome and with any luck will be in a major language soon. Erik motivated virtual classes using the standard expression problem and an example using wireless communication. He also talked a little about proof assistants, and gave a mention to his work with Sophia and I on Java wildcards.

Gilad Bracha talked about modules as objects in Newspeak and was awarded the best paper award. More nested classes stuff, this time to support modules. Late binding of names apparently gives nested and virtual classes and mixins straight up. Abolishing the global namespace means imports have to be passed in when top level classes are instantiated. At the root of it all, classes must be passed in by the IDE or some other tool. This leads to automatic sandboxing of code.

I liked the talk on inline caching, I love this kind of compiler optimisation stuff, it brings out my inner geek. But, it is far enough out of my area, that I need to read the paper to get the most out of that one, so no comments, sorry.

And that is the end of ECOOP for another year, now onto Malaga and TOOLS...