[TYPES/announce] Last CFP: Workshop on Compilers by Rewriting, Automated (COBRA 2011)

[James Cheney]

                         LAST CALL FOR PAPERS

                              COBRA 2011
         First Workshop on Compilers by Rewriting, Automated

          http://www.rdp2011.uns.ac.rs/workshops/cobra.html
                         Sunday, May 29, 2011

COBRA is a new workshop intended to promote research in and
collaboration on in the application of rewriting to compilers across
academia and industry.  We hope to provide a forum for presentation,
exchange, and discussion, of directions, developments, and results, as
well as surveys, tutorials, experience reports, and proposals, for
what is possible in this area!

The basic idea is that rewriting can be used to transform programs,
and indeed is used in that many compilers include some kind of rewrite
engine to realize optimizations such as algebraic rewrites, SSA tree
rewrites, type inference, static reduction, etc.  In this workshop it
is our hope that focusing on the rewrite transformations as proper
rewrite systems with formal rewrite rules can help us understand how
we can give access to generic formal rewriting techniques in a way
that can be directly exploited by the compiler writer without
sacrificing performance and expressiveness of the analyses and
transformations.

So in short: if you have used or thought about using rewriting in a
compiler, either a formal system or implemented a custom rewrite
mechanism, then we would like to hear about it!

The workshop will take place on Sunday, May 29, 2011, in Novi Sad,
Serbia, colocated with the 22nd International Conference on Rewriting
Techniques and Applications (RTA 2011) as a satellite event of the
Federated Conference on Rewriting, Deduction, and Programming (RDP
2011).

TOPICS

We invite submissions in the form of extended abstracts on the
following topics:

* Issues on using in algebraic, rewriting, logic, and other formal
  notations, as compiler specification languages.

* Formal notations for specifying specific compiler components such as
  normalization, intermediate languages, translation schemes,
  analysis, optimization, static reductions, code generation, data
  flow analysis.

* The role of type and sort systems in compiler specifications.

* The benefits and difficulties of higher order and first order
  formalisms in compiler specifications; the use of higher order
  abstract syntax and other encodings of binders.

* Formal code generation issues such as typed assembly language.

* How to generate efficient and even industrial strength compilers
  fully automatically from the specifications; how to deal with large
  sets of rewrite rules.

* The development cycle for generated compilers including issues of
  development environments and debugging of formal compiler
  specifications.

* Position papers on whether compiler generation based on rewriting
  can become a factor in mainstream compiler writing in industry and
  academia.

* Experience reports on and demonstrations of compilers based on
  formal rewrite systems using systems such as ASF+SDF, IMP, Rascal,
  MetaPRL, Coq, or even ANTLR TreeGrammars.

* System descriptions for new or extended systems used to build
  rewrite components of compilers, including systems that are
  themselves compilers for rewrite systems or other formalisms used to
  specify compilers.

* Presentations of how certain stages of existing compilers could be
  specified as formal rewrite systems.

Submissions should be no more than 6 pages and uploaded to
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cobra2011; if possible
please use the LaTeX style from http://www.easychair.org/easychair.zip.

IMPORTANT DATES

* Last day for submissions: Monday, March 21, 2011.
* Notification: Monday, April 4, 2011.
* Preliminary proceedings version due: Wednesday, April 20, 2011.
* Workshop: Sunday, May 29, 2011.

SELECTION COMMITTEE

* Kristoffer H. Rose (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, chair)
* James Cheney (University of Edinburgh)
* Kevin Millikin (Google)

For further information see the links on the conference web site,
http://www.rdp2011.uns.ac.rs/workshops/cobra.html, or contact
Kristoffer H. Rose, krisrose at us.ibm.com.