We had a productive meeting at the SPLASH conference last month – but then as often seems to be the case, ended up in various teaching and admin tasks once we got back.

The Grace BOF before the start of the conference proper was well attended, with a robust discussion on language principles, features, and syntax. We also managed to catch up with some of our supporters during conference sessions, in particular regarding concurrency support, and general ambiguity of language design.

The Grace Design workshop was held at Portland State – Yossi Gil, Daniel Zimmerman, Brian Foote and Dave Ungar were kind enough to share their expertise. We talked a lot about the big things: objects vs classes vs generics vs types, and certainly gained some confidence that the design would hold together. Towards the end we also covered a number of secondary topics quickly: annotations, reflection & meta-objects, assertions, type brands, and type-safe builder notations — and it seems most of our sketched ideas about how to address these points held up so far.

And finally, Microsoft Channel9’s Charles Torre interviewed Andrew and James about Grace along with many other interesting people at SPLASH.

We’re making progress finishing the first cut of the whole language design, but it’s fair to say our efforts at documentation are a little behind or efforts in design. But there should be more details soon.