An Introduction to Redex with Abstracting Abstract Machines

An Introduction to Redex with Abstracting Abstract Machines(dvanhorn.github.io)

53 points by jcr 10 years ago | 6 comments

jcr 10 years ago |

This was posted once before by HN user 'ingve' but didn't get much attention [1]. Though the most recent and largest (39 pages) JFP paper, "Systematic Abstraction of Abstract Machines", is probably the best version to read, the earlier "Abstracting Abstract Machines" may also be helpful. There's also a CACM highlight version of "Abstracting Abstract Machines" that's only 8 pages. All of these papers are available.

- "Systematic Abstraction of Abstract Machines" from JFP 2012 (39 pages)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3539

- "Abstracting Abstract Machines" from ACM ICFP, 2010, (12 pages)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.4446

http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2014/cmsc631/papers/vanhorn-...

- "Abstracting Abstract Machines" from CACM highlight 2011 (8 pages)

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dvanhorn/pubs/vanhorn-might-cacm...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963677

logicrook 10 years ago | |

Oh thanks, that looks pretty interesting, and will distract from shitposting on random pop-science/political quasi-journalism articles for a while. It seems that it was the purpose of HN, but I'm not sure anymore.

However, it is unfortunately hard to make relevant comments on such articles. As the introduction says, it's pretty quick to set everything up (just one apt-get away), the clean racket syntax allows to define a calculus very neatly, but that's a far cry from being able to say much about it. I think I'll try to follow the tutorial with a classical calculus (λμ) and see how that turns out, but that's going to take some time. So here goes "This was posted once before by HN user 'ingve' but didn't get much attention".

jcr 10 years ago | | |

The types and quality of stories on HN are like the tides; it regularly varies. One of the goals for HN is to have a good, balanced mix of interesting stories. Due to voting, populist stuff will surface, but HN still has an appreciation for heavy-weight, time-intensive articles.

Some truly great stories get few, if any, comments. If a post requires effort or specialized knowledge to even ask good questions, then there isn't much discussion. This happens a lot when academic papers are posted since reading a paper might require a multi-hour investment, but even when there is little discussion, it's good to have heavy articles submitted. They balance out the other stuff.

If you find something great-but-overlooked in the /newest queue, then send an email to hn@ycombinator.com asking for a repost request to be sent to the original submitter. That's what I did with this article, but Dan (dang) asked me to repost it myself. Neither 'ingve' nor I care who gets the credit/karma, but a lot of people want great articles to get attention on HN.

HN is what we make it.

labichn 10 years ago | |

In addition to the early publications, I would also recommend section 2 of T. Gilray et al.'s "Pushdown Control-Flow Analysis for Free" (POPL '16) as a slightly higher-level introduction to AAM [1]. It's the cleanest presentation I've seen to date.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03137