Welcome Back!

I hope you enjoyed the summer break and managed to catch up on some of your reading :). To kick things off again, I’ve pulled together a selection of papers from ECOOP ’15 that was held in Prague last month:

• Towards Practical Gradual Typing examines the age-old debate between dynamically and statically typed languages and how we might be able to have the best of both worlds rather than being forced to choose.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Empirical Study of Implicit Type Conversions in JavaScript studies a large corpus of JavaScript code to see how coercions are used in practice and analysises which of these might actually be harmful. Do coercions deserve their bad reputation?
• Optimization Coaching for JavaScript is a look inside the workings of the JIT and some of its most important optimizations. When an optimization can almost-but-not-quite be applied can we feed this back to the programmer to help improve program performance?
• Cooking the books: Formalizing JMM Implementation Recipes continues looking lower down the stack. This paper examines the Java Memory Model cookbook recipes and via a formal model shows how the JMM can be safely mapped to both x86 and Power architectures. They find and solve some problems with the Power mapping in the Cookbook along the way….
• Access-Rights Analysis in the Presence of Subjects introduces the first static analysis tool for security permissions that can cope with Subject-based permissions models. It found and corrected hundreds of problems in the WebSphere Application Server codebase on the way to CC EAL 4 certification.

So that’s a little taster of what’s coming up this week, and we’ll have a couple more from the ECOOP program next week too.