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.

Our first couple of Grace events at Splash happened over the last couple of days: These were a talk at the COOMP workshop on Modelling with Grace; and the Grace BoF.

Both went well, the slides from the BoF are now online.

One question we’ve answered a few times is: how has the project come along since the last SPLASH? Well we’re not done, but we’ve certainly made a good start:

• Core language design worked out
• Good Progress on the type system
• Working on the module system, inheritance, and annotations
• Prototype compiler of much of Grace targeting the LLVM, C, Javascript
• Prototype interpreters of some of Grace in Java & Smalltalk

Looking at this list makes me realize we haven’t blogged about many of these things, so we’ll try to feed some details out over the next few weeks. If you’re really keen, there are draft specs in the documentation folder. As ever, we’re interested in your feedback, comments, suggestions, or offers to help.

Andrew and James will be at SPLASH for the next couple of days, and we should have time to talk about Grace (or most other things 🙂

If you’re around on the Friday after SPLASH, some of us will meet to talk more about the language design — email (or talk) to James or Andrew to find out the arrangements.

We have arranged for a room for a Grace presentation/discussion at ECOOP tonight at 5:15 p.m. Please come to George Fox lecture theater 5/6 for the presentation. We will go out to dinner somewhere after the session (suggestions on where to go are welcome).

If you would like to learn more about Grace but cannot come to that session, please contact Kim or James at the meetings this week and we will make time to meet with you.

We are anxious for feedback on our language design, so please come if you can.

The Grace workshop to work through details of the language design — particularly regarding types vs classes remains on Saturday, for people staying longer.

We want Grace’s language design process to be as open as possible, and especially to involve people with interest and experience in programming language design. To this end, we plan to hold a series of informal workshops in 2011 to report progress, to discuss challenges, and hopefully to involve others to the project.

The first two workshops will be held in Europe & the UK in late February:

• Sunday 27th February, TU Darmstad
• Monday 28th February, Imperial College, London,

The main ideas of these workshops will be to:

• get feedback on the current language design
• help us planing in moving forwards
• find ways of involving more people in the project

From our point of view, the most important thing is feedback on the evolving design — what looks like it’s working well, what doesn’t, what’s missing, etc. (Yes, this does mean we will need to produce a draft design in good time before these workshops).

So, if you’re interested in the Grace project, and would like to come to one of these workshops, the please let us know by emailing James, kjx@ecs.vuw.ac.nz.