Recent years have seen a surge of interest in staging and generative programming, driven by the increasing difficulty of making high-level code run fast on modern hardware. While the mechanics of program generation are relatively well understood, we have only begun to understand how to develop systems in a generative way. The Lightweight Modular Staging (LMS) platform forms the core of a research agenda to make generative programming more widely accessible, through powerful libraries and a growing selection of case studies that illuminate design patterns and crystallize best practices for high-level and effective generative programming. This talk will reflect on the foundations of LMS, on applications, achievements, challenges, as well as ongoing and future work.

Tiark Rompf is an assistant professor at Purdue University. His work focuses on runtime code generation, advanced compiler technology, and associated language support. From 2008 to 2014 he was a member of Martin Odersky’s Scala team at EPFL where he developed the LMS compiler framework and made various contributions to the Scala language and toolchain (delimited continuations, efficient immutable data structures, compiler speedups, type system work).