Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Object-oriented programming is the dominant paradigm used for general-purpose high-level programming in academic and industrial environments. However, some specific software engineering issues are not sufficiently taken into account by software production chains based on object-oriented technologies. In our proposal ""An Object-Oriented Programming Language for Robust Software"", we plan to investigate improvements to object-oriented programming languages to address some of those key software engineering issues. For instance, during the development of the Reflex system, a highly responsive task programming framework for Java, the Java memory model and its lack of isolation was a main concern, forcing us to severely restrict data types in thread communication. We are also developing solutions to address the problem of null pointer errors, interface with other software components, and lack of isolation in object-oriented languages. To experimentally validate our solution, we will develop some variations of the Java language. We also intend to integrate more fundamental proposals in our Nit project that is currently actively developed (http://www.nitlanguage.org) and will be used as a framework for the integration of new implementation techniques and new programming language designs (where PRM focused only implementation techniques) thanks to internal and external collaboration (UQAM, LIRMM).