[Haskell-cafe] Places to write and publish projects that "explain ideas"?

[Siddharth Bhat]

Regarding (1), as far as I'm aware, the requirements are flexible, but the
general requirement
is "published a paper at a good venue, either journal or conference". This
implementation
was a hobby project of mine, but I was hoping to be able to justify
spending more time on it
by finding a venue to publish it at.

As for (2), it's mostly expository. The techniques that I am interesting in
showing off have no
known "simple" implementations as far as I'm aware -- scalar evolution,
polyhedral
compilation, some kinds of inter-procedural analyses, SSA, etc. do not have
simple
implementations. Indeed, the goal is to show how to write *optmising*
compilers.
Most
compilers books teach one how to write *a compiler, *while there's a second
course usually on
compiler optimisation. I don't know of readable, clean implementations of,
say, the SSA
construction algorithm, or the scalar evolution analysis.

Regarding nanopass: I think it makes a lot of sense as a philosophy as a
way to architect
compilers. However, there are a lot of nice haskell-isms to write compilers
which are
scattered throughout the literature, as far as I can tell: Hoopl, trees
that grow, much of
Matt might's work on abstracting abstract interpreters,
Scrap-your-boilerplate style techniques,
equality saturation, etc. which are all fantastic, but I've never seen them
under the
same umbrella.

So that's a sketch of the general story I want to tell :)

Thanks.
~Siddharth


On Tue, Dec 25, 2018 at 7:30 PM Richard O'Keefe <raoknz at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Question 1:  what does your department require?  The first person to
> consult
> is your supervisor.  Helping students figure out where to publish is
> definitely
> part of a supervisor's job (speaking as a former supervisor of PhD
> students).
>
> Question 2:  what is the TOPIC of your publication?  Since you are merely
> (!)
> demonstrating known techniques on a toy language, does it really count as
> work on compilers?   Is it software engineering?  Is it computer science
> education?  Is the aim to develop something more maintainable?  What is the
> quality metric by which your work should be judged?
>
> Observation:  if you haven't already read the "Nanopass" paper,
> https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf ,
> you should do so now.  http://nanopass.org/ is the associated web site.
> There is also a mailing list,
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nanopass-framework
> I think your aims are sufficiently close to theirs for you to have
> interesting things to say to each other, despite you using Haskell and
> them having used Scheme.
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20181225/cb4786ab/attachment.html>