Dynamic Might
March 1, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
There was no official theme designated for the Lang.NET symposium, Microsoft’s irregular colloquium for compiler and language geeks. But the company might as well have hung a banner on Building 20 saying, “No Static Typing!” True, everyone expected the emphasis on the Dynamic Language Runtime, which will become available in the browser as part of Silverlight 2.0, but it was still disconcerting to be at a Microsoft conference and hear more about Java runtimes than C++ compilers.
The presence of such Java luminaries as Charles Nutter, John Rose, Brian Goetz and Gilad Bracha was a breath of fresh air. Nutter said he felt he was in a “mirror universe,” facing the same concerns but tackling them with slightly different strategies. Although there was some reflexive rivalry—Microsoft’s pride in the CLR/DLR was countered by Nutter’s occasionally dismissing a feature as “they need to do that because they don’t have as good a runtime optimizer as Hotspot”—such pro forma sniping was largely submerged by a passionate agreement that “dynamic is clearly best!”
That was the title of one slide by Chuck Esterbrook, whose Cobra Language (cobra-language.com) extends Eiffel-style contracts with built-in unit testing. The next slide read, somewhat heretically for the conference, “Static is clearly best!” In fact, of the languages presented at the conference, Cobra seemed to have the most compile-time features and was well suited to creating reliable software.
Software reliability was another theme, with a presentation by Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillman on PEX, a Microsoft Research project that uses a constraint solver systematically to flush out unexplored execution routes. And Wesner Moise discussed NStatic analyzer, which promised breakthrough capabilities and might be in public beta as you read this.
Reliability is also part of the promise of Intentional Software, the company of Charles Simonyi (he of Hungarian notation and space tourism) that has been on the road to beta for several years. Magnus Christerson gave a jaw-dropping demo of what the company has developed, which I’ll explore in a future column.
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