I am developing a new language aa, to explore: a new way to type programs (full type inference and dataflow typing), the limits of terse syntax (no keywords), and support for high performance and systems’ coding. This is a very early preview talk, to discuss the typing system and goals for ‘aa’. There is no execution engine (yet!), but many interesting program fragments can be typed. Open questions include: the exceptions, concurrency, typed-assembly, and modules (at least). For systems’ coders: both AOT and JIT technologies are options, and both optional GC and a rust-style memory lifetime typing. I hope this talk sparks a discussion on language features of interest to people who write e.g. operating systems and GCs.

Cliff Click was the CTO of Neurensic, and CTO and Co-Founder of h2o.ai (formerly 0xdata), a firm dedicated to creating a new way to think about web-scale data storage and real-time analytics. I wrote my first compiler when I was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although my most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). I helped Azul Systems build an 864 core pure-Java mainframe that keeps GC pauses on 500Gb heaps to under 10ms, and worked on all aspects of that JVM. Before that I worked on HotSpot at Sun Microsystems, and am at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream.

Previously I was with Motorola where I helped deliver industry leading SpecInt2000 scores on PowerPC chips, and before that I researched compiler technology at HP Labs. I am invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences including JavaOne, JVM, ECOOP and VEE; I’ve served on the Program Committee of many conferences (including PLDI and OOPSLA); and have published many papers about HotSpot technology. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University and about 20 patents.