Michael Homer
See:
- Publications and archived author copies
- Research areas include:
- Enabling programming language features, like user-defined sublanguages and type systems
- Hybrid and visual programming interfaces, including Tiled Grace
- Operating system design, including with GoboLinux and using Lively
- Compositional programming languages, including Kihi, an explicit concatenative language
- Programming education, including the Grace language and work on programming instruction
- Other software I created, including dragon-drop and jqjs
- My thesis, Graceful Language Extensions and Interfaces
- Elsewhere: Mastodon; Victoria University of Wellington; Bluesky; GitHub
Recent Publications
View the author copy.Self-hosted software language systems need to bootstrap core components such as data structure libraries, parsers, type checkers, or even compilers. Bytecode interpreters can load byte code files, while image-based systems can load in images of entire systems — Emacs, for example, does both. Bootstrapping is more of a problem, however, for traditional AST-based systems, especially when they must be portable across multiple host systems and languages.
In this short paper, we demonstrate how abstract syntax trees can quickly and easily be incorporated into the source code of an embedded interpreter. Our key insight is that a carefully engineered format enables textually identical ASTs to be valid across a wide spectrum of contemporary programming languages. This means languages can be self-hosted with very little bootstrapping infrastructure: only the host interpreter or compiler and a minimal default library, while the rest of the system is imported as ASTs.
This paper outlines our technique, and analyses the engineering design tradeoffs required to make it work in practice. We validate our design by describing our experience supporting the on-going development of GraceKit, which shares a single Grace parser across host language implementations from Java and JavaScript to Haskell and Swift and to Grace itself, and even more eccentric languages like Excel.