Programming languages are islands, each disconnected from the rest. We choose a language for a task and, for better or worse, stick with it. Communicating between programs written in different languages is such a slow, arduous, task that we avoid doing it whenever possible.

In this talk I will first show how language composition can lower, and even remove, the barriers between languages. We have pioneered new approaches to the two major challenges in language composition: editing and running composed programs. Using our novel editor ‘Eco’, users can write source files that contain fragments of multiple languages. We then run multi-language programs using composed meta-tracing VMs. Our preliminary results suggest that performance of composed programs is often competitive with traditional mono-language VMs.

Joint work with Edd Barrett, Carl Friedrich Bolz, Lukas Diekmann, Geoff French, and Sarah Mount. More at http://soft-dev.org/

I am a programmer and Reader in Software Development in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London where I lead the Software Development Team. I am an EPSRC Fellow. I co-founded Elbatrop.