Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

This research focuses on systems programming-languages, able to construct low-level high-performance applications, like operating systems, databases, and network systems, forming the core of all software development. The C programming language is a systems language providing the foundational technology for modern computing with billions of lines of code implementing small and large systems, e.g., Linux, Windows. Nevertheless, C, standardized 30 years ago, lacks features that make programming in modern languages safer and more productive. The research goal is to create an extension of C, called Cforall, providing modern safety and productivity features, while still ensuring backwards compatibility with C and its programmers. Specifically, Cforall is designed to have an orthogonal feature-set based closely on the C programming paradigm (non-object-oriented) and these features can be added incrementally to an existing C code-base, allowing programmers to learn Cforall on an as-needed basis, preserving investment in existing code and employees. Traditional and new programming languages have different syntax and semantics from C, only interoperate indirectly with C, and are not systems languages because of managed memory (ownership/garbage collection). To accomplish the research goal, this grant will continue development of Cforall, which is only at the proof-of-concept (alpha) stage. Continued development involves fleshing out Cforall to the beta stage by completing several design and implementation objectives, culminating in multiple staged releases to researchers and educators. These objectives include efficiently implementing the Cforall type-system because of complex type-unification and extensions for user-defined conversions, virtual pointers, more concurrent types, and advanced exceptions, arrays, strings and collections, none of which exist in C. The result of this project is a language that is backwards compatible with both C code and programmer intuition, yet adds modern language features and fixes many well-known C problems. Given the continuing vitality of the C ecosystem, there is significant impetus for a modern transformation of C.