Track: 21st Century Languages

10:35am - 11:25am

WebAssembly: Neither Web Nor Assembly, But Revolutionary

A revolution has begun. WebAssembly is a new, efficient and safe bytecode designed and maintained by most of the major players in tech: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Intel, LG, and many others. This unprecedented collaboration to standardize a new, cross-platform instruction set has opened the door to a future where any language can efficiently target the web—but it’s not actually just for the web! WebAssembly is so revolutionary it’s already being used outside of the web, even being integrated into operating systems, running on servers, powering blockchain compute platforms, and more.

In this talk learn what WebAssembly is and what it isn’t, while discussing the design decisions and compromises made to meet these goals.

11:50am - 12:40pm

Kotlin: Write Once, Run (Actually) Everywhere

Kotlin used to be described as a new language for the JVM which aims to fix some of the pain points of Java. But more recently Kotlin is also a language for the web, iOS, desktop, embedded, and just about anywhere else code can run. JetBrains, the creators of Kotlin, have placed a strong emphasis on targeting multiple platforms in how the language is compiled, its language features, and the standard libraries. This talk will be an exploration of the Kotlin language, how it compiles to run on more than just the JVM, and whether it can fully pull off the multiplatform trick allowing a single codebase to run everywhere.

1:40pm - 2:30pm

The Most Secure Program Is One That Doesn’t Exist

Rust is a programming language that started with the explicit goal of preventing segfaults and guaranteeing thread safety to create a fearlessly concurrent systems language. The compiler enforces type- and memory- safety to achieve this. There’s a significant overlap between critical security bugs and memory vulnerabilities, so code written in Rust is more secure. But that’s only half the story. Can a language mitigate side-channel attacks? How can we integrate formal methods to prove implementation correctness? This talk will give an overview of how Rust’s design gives security guarantees and discuss goals and visions for the future.

2:55pm - 3:45pm

Go - A Key Language in Enterprise Application Development?

Go’s popularity in the last few years is hard to miss. It has jumped up in the Tiobe index and is holding steady.  The language has had a significant impact on the startup scene due to its simplicity, speed and enabling productivity in engineering teams. Large companies are starting to take notice. We also see a huge amount of community involvement in Go. If you have lived through the growth of Java in the late 90’s, this feels a bit like `déjà vu.’  In this talk, I will go over the Go language design and talk about why Go matters in the age of multicores and cloud-native computing.

4:10pm - 5:00pm

21st Century Languages Panel

Join track hosts Ashley Williams (Core Rust Team member) as she pulls together an interlanguage working group to discuss our software languages. There's no Golden Hammer come hear an active discussion on picking the right one for your use case! 

5:25pm - 6:15pm

3 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Languages

When I first sat down to design a language I had a rough time.  I sat for months in front of a blank screen trying to invent, ex nihilo, a syntax that looked sufficiently different from anything I had ever seen. Isolation wasn’t working.  But every time I talked to someone about what I was working on they spun me far off course, either with scorn (e.g. “hahahaha, what do you need a new language for?”) or with opinions (e.g., “it needs to have promises and futures”).  Finally, after years of labor and dissemination, my first language never really gained more than one user. I had failed; I was discouraged; I wished I had never begun.

That was seven years ago.  Today, that language (called `Dedalus’) still permeates my life in every way.  Sure, it has an uncreative syntax and rigid rules that sometimes make it difficult to express things that are easy in more familiar languages. Sure, it is essentially impossible to sell to users -- even my own team members and students!  Nonetheless, I use Dedalus every day. It helps me to write useful programs, but more importantly, it frames how I am allowed to think about its target domain.  When I use Dedalus to model a system I thought I understood, I often learn something new.  It has created a scaffolding on which every piece of my subsequent research hangs. That failed language is probably the most important success of my life.

In this talk, I hope to convince you that there is more than one reason to engage in language design and more than one way to do it.  I hope to communicate why someone would (and indeed many of us should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use.  Along the way, I will share some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided my design process.