Welcome to the Rice PLT project on

Resource Aware Programming (RAP)

Our research group develops and applies state-of-the-art programming languages techniques such as multi-stage programming and dependent types to challenging domains such as embedded and real-time systems, device drivers, and hardware design and synthesis.

Multi-stage languages already provide significant safety guarantees. For example, a program generator written in such a language not only is type-safe in the traditional sense, but we are guaranteed that any generated program will also be type safe. This provides a noteworthy degree of assurance about the quality of the generated code. But like most traditional high-level programming techniques, multi-stage programming was designed to satisfy functional requirements rather than operational ones, and existing multi-stage languages do not provide any guarantees about the behavior of programs in the presence of bounded resources. The challenge in this setting is ensuring that the generated programs are suitable for execution on an embedded platform.

Our current focus is on ways to address this problem by strengthening ``traditional'' multi-stage type systems using (mainly) foundational techniques from type theory and functional reactive programming (FRP) to create a paradigm of resource-aware multi-stage programming. Linear and alias types (in conjunction with dependent typing) will be used to ensure space-boundedness, new typing techniques are used to ensure time-boundedness, and signals and behaviors from FRP allow for a natural style of reactive programming.

People

• Faculty: Walid Taha
• Postdoctoral Fellows: Emir Pasalic, Jeremy Siek
• PhD students: Anthony Castanares, Seth Fogarty Roumen Kaiabachev Dave Peixotto
• Undergraduate students: Eric Cheng, Emily Fortuna, Jennifer Gillenwater, Gregory Malecha (Century Scholar), Dan Vanderkam, Chris Warrington

Activities

• Publications
• Software: MetaOCaml
• Research Seminar
• Upcoming Conferences
• Scholarship and Summer Study Opportunities for students
• Internal Wiki
• RAP in the news: America's Tech Demise Greatly Exaggerated

Posters

• Taming Program Generation
• PreVIEW: A Model for Supporting Higher-order, Generative Programming in Visual Languages
• Dr. X: A Model for Programming Language
• Programming Language Support for Generic Libraries (Winner of 3rd place!)
• Synthesizing Device Drivers

Former Members

• Kedar Swadi (now at Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd, Pune, India),
• Stephan Ellner (now at Google),
• Edward Pizzi (BSc. Brown Undergrad Scholar. Now at Google),
• Van Bui (UoH undergrad. NSF REU Scholar),
• Robert Tannenbaum (UoH undergrad. NSF REU Scholar),
• Miguel Guerrero (UoH undergrad. NSF REU Scholar),
• Travis Fischer (Brown Undergrad Scholar),
• Bennet Lau,
• Adam Wulf,
• Matt Gen (NSF REU Scholar)

Acknowledgments

Supported by NSF ITR "A Framework for Rapid Development of Reliable Robotics Software"