Recent submissions

Comment · 8 months ago
What is your take on usability of these systems? In practice they seem to be rather un-ergonomic and usage devolves into require everything.

As agentic systems seem to mainly interoperate with REST style systems I suspect that using URIs for resource use descriptions would be more natural.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Just saw the edit. I have 2 answers:

1) Fuzzing is under-utilized even for simple code. AFL is dead easy to use and, even so, most projects don't have it in CI runs. So, despite how much I like it, in general it seems people do not see value in this type of testing.

2) The effort to handle external state (say a restful call to get stock ticker info) needs to be mocked -- which is deeply unpopular -- or handled by record/replay which works ok-ish but eventually breaks down with divergences. Outside of well-chosen domains it these eventually pop-up and add an additional pain point that builds on item 1.

Comment · 2 years ago
At the end of the day you have 2 problems (1) how to make execution deterministic within some boundary be it a process, hypervisor, or distributed system and (2) how you handle non-determinism when data crosses this boundary. You can move the boundaries and effort around but the problems always exist. So, if you are claiming that you have a sweet spot on this tradeoff then I could certainly believe that, if you claim that you eliminated this boundary issue then I am highly credulous.

I'll agree with you on indeterminate behaviors though, I suspect they will eventually be seen like the "billion dollar" mistake of null pointers.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks for sharing, I felt like there were earlier but the x,y trick jumped out at me and that was the one I remembered off the top of my head.
Comment · 2 years ago
I think you underestimate the level to which this area has been studied. And I wish you would talk about these new results then instead of announcing 5+ year old results then.

It would be great to see progress in this area (not my primary area of work BTW) but I am not seeing anything here, technically, that is going to make that happen -- maybe it is just getting all the parts in place and magic happens. It just makes me scratch my head a bit.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
The design of the language is done in a manner that allows us to translate the code (and all conditions) into very friendly SMTLib code -- that we don't need to add a lot of additional checks like frame rules or havocs and where the set of theories (and their combinations) are well behaved.

We have some info on this in the research papers section and documents but are planning on a full paper focused on how this is done (particularly in the presence of union types, dynamic records/tuples, etc.)

Comment · 6 years ago
Hi and thanks for the questions:

1. By design the language provides some novel memory invariants including, no cycles in the object graph, no old-to-new pointers, and no pointer updates. Thus, we don't need to worry about cycle collection, can greatly reduce the number of Ref-Count operations, and can (later) employ pool allocation more consistently.

2. Bosque also supports by-value types (including the future ability to do by-value unions) and, since the language is referentially transparent, the compiler can aggressively use stack allocation and copy semantics. Also, the collections are all fully determinized and use low-variance implementations to avoid "bad luck" performance anomalies.

3. The compiler does not enforce the checks. They can either be checked at runtime or checked by converting the program into a logical form that Z3 or another theorem prover can check. Values in the language are immutable and there is no concurrency (yet) but since the language is immutable concurrency is by definition data-race free.

Comment · 6 years ago
You are right, allof is inconsistent with the language naming conventions. I was updating some other collections support and made that fix as well. Thanks!

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