LispNYC - Lisp Meeting, February 13th 7:00pm at Trinity (NYC)

Please join us (LispNYC) for our next meeting on Tuesday, February 13th 
from 7:00pm to 9:00pm at Trinity Lutheran Church in New York City 
(Lower East Side, address and directions below).


Pinku Surana presents his dissertation "Meta-Compilation of Language
Abstractions" where he discusses the benefits of user-written compiler
extensions.  This leads to simple APIs, optimizations, and the clean
embedding of domain-specific languages:

    High-level programming languages are currently transformed
    into efficient low-level code using optimizations that are
    encoded directly into the compiler. Libraries, which are
    semantically rich user-level abstractions, are largely
    ignored by the compiler. Consequently, library writers often
    provide a complex, low-level interface to which programmers
    "manually compile" their high-level ideas. If library
    writers provide a high-level interface, it generally comes
    at the cost of performance. Ideally, library writers should
    provide a high-level interface and a means to compile it
    efficiently.
    
    This dissertation demonstrates that a compiler can be
    dynamically extended to support user-level abstractions. The
    Sausage meta-compilation system is an extensible
    source-to-source compiler for a subset of the Scheme
    programming language. Since the source language lacks nearly
    all the abstractions found in popular languages, new
    abstractions are implemented by a library and a compiler
    extension. In fact, Sausage implements all its
    general-purpose optimizations for functional languages as
    compiler extensions. A meta-compiler, therefore, is merely a
    shell that coordinates the execution of many external
    extensions to compile a single module. Sausage demonstrates
    that a compiler designed to be extended can evolve and adapt
    to new domains without a loss of efficiency.

Dr. Surana received his Doctorate in Computer Science from Northwestern
University.  He has spent several years working at Motorola's Software
Research Center and has completed internships at Microsoft Research.
His thesis is available here:
 ftp://lispnyc.org/meeting-assets/2007-01-14_surana/SuranaThesis.pdf

Directions to Trinity
  Trinity Lutheran 
  602 E. 9th St. & Ave B., on Thomkins Square Park 
  New York, New York 10009
  http://trinitylowereastside.org/

  From N,R,Q,W (8th Street NYU Stop) and the 4,5 (Astor Street Stop): 
    Walk East 4 blocks on St. Marks, cross Thomkins Square Park. 

  From F&V (2nd Ave Stop): 
    Walk E one or two blocks, turn north for 8 short blocks 

  From L (1st Ave Stop): 
    Walk E one block, turn sounth for 5 short blocks 

  The M9 bus line drops you off at the doorstep and the M15 is near get 
  off on St. Marks & 1st) 

  To get there by car, take the FDR (East River Drive) to Houston then 
  go NW till you're at 9th & B.  Week-night parking isn't bad at all, 
  but if you're paranoid about your Caddy or in a hurry, there is a 
  parking garage on 9th between 1st and 3rd Ave.