"Abstract:

The design of Mezzo

Mezzo is a typed programming language in the ML family whose static discipline controls aliasing and ownership. This rules out certain mistakes, including representation exposure and data races, and opens up new opportunities, such as gradual initialization or (more generally, and somewhat speculatively) the definition and enforcement of object protocols.

In this talk, I will explain the basic design of Mezzo and illustrate it with several examples. Although the core static discipline forbids sharing mutable objects, Mezzo offers several mechanisms for working around this restriction.
I will discuss two of them, namely locks and adoption & abandon. Both can be viewed as dynamic mechanisms for the control of ownership.

This is joint work with Jonathan Protzenko and Thibaut Balabonski.

Host: Lars Birkedal"