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SUMMARY:Sync meeting and Stephen Kell talk: Towards a dynamic object model
  within Unix processes - Stephen Kell
DTSTART:20151021T120000Z
DTEND:20151021T130000Z
UID:TALK61972@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Peter Sewell
DESCRIPTION:Programmers face much complexity from the co-existence of\n"na
 tive" (Unix-like) and [language] virtual machine (VM) "managed"\nrun-time 
 environments. Despite historical intentions\, language VMs have\nlargely f
 ailed to replace Unix processes. In this talk I'll explore an\napproach in
  which Unix processes instead "become VMs". This means\nevolving Unix's us
 er-level services to subsume those of VMs\, in a\nhighly compatible way. I
 'll describe a system\, liballocs\, whose design\nachieves this by exploit
 ing the existing (little-understood) rudiments\nof reflection and late-bin
 ding in modern Unix\, while addressing two\nrecurring shortcomings: a lack
  of semantic metadata ("type\ninformation") and the inability to bind from
  objects "back" to their\nmetadata. I'll also describe some applications o
 f liballocs: run-time\ntype-checking\, FFI-less language interoperability\
 , dynamically precise\ndebugging\, and programmer-friendly disk I/O.
LOCATION:FW11
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