BitC
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This article or section contains information about scheduled or expected future software. Information about it may change as the software release approaches and more information becomes available. |
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| Original author(s) | Jonathan S. Shapiro, Swaroop Sridhar, and M. Scott Doerrie |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Johns Hopkins University, The EROS Group, LLC |
| Stable release | BitCC 0.9.1 / February 17, 2006 |
| Preview release | BitC 0.10.1 / June 17, 2006 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Compiler |
| License | BSD |
| Website | http://www.bitc-lang.org/ |
| Developer | Johns Hopkins University |
|---|---|
| Influenced by | Haskell, ML |
| License | BSD |
| Website | http://www.bitc-lang.org/ |
BitC is a programming language currently being developed by researchers[1] at the Johns Hopkins University and The EROS Group, LLC, as part of the Coyotos project. The language has two primary objectives:
- To merge the advances of modern programming languages; sound type systems with abstraction, sound and complete type inference, let-polymorphism, and mathematically grounded semantics — with the requirements of systems programming; first-class treatment of state, support for prescriptive low-level representation, explicitly unboxed types, and performance comparable to C.
- Eventually, to support formal program verification of low-level systems programs, such as kernels/microkernels.
It is an innovative language in that it combines the concepts of higher-order functional programming languages like ML and Haskell with the close hardware interaction of low-level programming languages like C. The current language syntax is derived from the syntax of Lisp, but this is expected to be replaced as the language comes to its first release.[citation needed]
From the standpoint of programming language evolution, BitC's most important innovation is the first sound and complete type inference algorithm that handles generalized state and unboxing. With the recent (not yet implemented) addition of effect typing, BitC presents an interesting middle position between purely functional and traditionally state-oriented languages.
From the perspective of systems programmers, BitC may be more interesting for the fact that the non-optimizing research prototype compiler is delivering performance on early benchmarks that falls within 1% to 1.5% of C on comparable code.
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[edit] History
The goals for the BitC language were set out in 2004 in Towards a Verified, General-Purpose Operating System Kernel (html, pdf) presented at the 2004 NICTA OS Verification Workshop. Some details of the origins and early evolution of the language can be found in The Origins of the BitC Programming Language (html, pdf).
In 2006, Shapiro left Johns Hopkins to form The EROS Group, LLC, and the BitC project became a joint effort between the two organizations.
As the end of 2008 approaches, the specification for the first released version of the language and its compiler is converging rapidly into its final form, and the prototype compiler has demonstrated favorable performance on microbenchmarks.
Jonathan S. Shapiro has been a driving force behind both BitC and Coyotos.[2] In April 2009, Shapiro announced that he had accepted a position at Microsoft to work on the Midori project, and that after August 2009 he would not be working further on BitC[3].
[edit] Status
BitC is currently under simultaneous development with the main Coyotos project. An early compiler for BitC, known as BitCC, was first released in an alpha form (v. 0.10.1) on June 17, 2006.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.bitc-lang.org/people.html
- ^ http://www.coyotos.org/history.html
- ^ http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/2009-April/001784.html
[edit] External links
- BitC homepage
- BitC Language Specification (html, pdf)
- BitC-dev mailing list archives
- Coyotos homepage
- Jonathan Shapiro's homepage
