SUD 2007 roundup

Warning: rather long story with a lot of my own opinions up ahead!

I attended my first Stratego User Days this week without really knowing what to expect. I had seen the titles of the talks, but some of them still made me wonder about what was going to be presented. So I took the train to Delft with sleepy eyes and a blank mind.

If you think that the SUD is like a conference then you are wrong, it is more of an informal gathering of people that use Stratego. They explain to each other what they do, how they handle problems and what they would like to see in the next release of Stratego. At first this gave me the idea that the room would be filled with _all_ of the users of Stratego, which was probably true for some of the earliest SUD's, but the first presentation of the day already proved that this idea was wrong. Martin Bravenboer started the SUD with a presentation about the current status of Stratego. He did not only explain how hard they worked on the 0.17 release, but also showed a list of papers and projects, including one complete slide about PHP-SAT, that use Stratego. Some of the people on this list use Stratego without any help from 'the core people', Martin and Eelco, so this probably shows that Stratego is catching on. Martin also mentioned that they are several (Phd) positions to fill, so if anybody is interested they should contact him.

Eelco Visser gave a presentation about the new compilation scheme of Stratego.The presentation was a bit too technical for me, but it showed some nice goals and resulted in a (short) discussion. The discussion ended at the moment that Eelco gave the right example by getting himself some coffee.

Martin continued after the break with a presentation about the new library structure of Stratego. He explained why almost all of the functionality is moved to the library in order to target the portability problem. The funny thing is that some of the presentations that where about to come would complain about this problem, which shows that the needs from the community are actually being fulfilled. I liked the fact that Martin gave lot's of examples that used php-front to illustrate the new features, always nice to see your own stuff used.

We had lunch a little late because we already hopelessly behind schedule, but it was still very nice. I have to say that I like the cafeteria in Delft, the money/food ratio is pretty good. The presentation of PHP-SAT started after the lunch and went very well. The people looked interested even after the moment that the laptop shut himself down because the battery was empty. Karl Trygve Kalleberg mentioned that IBM also had a project about static analysis of source code called Wala, but he did not remember whether it supported PHP. So I tried to find the PHP-part, but I could not find it so it is probably not supported.

Benoit Sigoure talked about his project in which he extended PRISM to deal with real life problems. I always enjoy it when somebody talks about projects that are really useful to them. He also mentioned some problems that he encountered and gave a 'wish list' of items he wanted to see in Stratego. I have experienced most of the problems he has and I totally agree with the fact that he wants some more static checking. One of the other wishes was a debugger and I would like to put this on top of the list. Being able to step through my Stratego program is something that would help me a lot, and others as well.

During the coffee break that followed the presentation of Benoit one of the girls in the room next-door asked me what kind of meeting we had. I explained the concepts of the SUD to here and she replayed with the phrase: ..I already thought that it was something with programming, you are all wearing those nerdy-code-t-shirts.., thank you very much indeed.

After I had probably been insulted by the girl, Mikal Ziane and Nicolas Pierron talked about Lutin. They use java-front and dryad to do some kind of code refactoring, but it wasn't completely clear to me. I think I might have understand things better if we weren't interrupted by the fire-alarm. It gave us a change to see some of the campus and the other people in the building, but it didn't help us to keep up with the schedule.

The presentation of Wouter Caarls about embedding Stratego in C showed another thing that can be done with Stratego. The techniques he used where not very complicated, most of them where also covered in program transformation course in Utrecht, but the combination was interesting.

Valentin David his presentation ended the day by giving an overview of the current C++-front-ends. This presentation was not very interesting to me because I (currently) do not use C++, but I can at least find it again when I need to. But during the talk he mentioned semantic designs, which offers support for analysis. They also have a front-end for PHP, so I probably should take the time to take a look at this.

The second day of the SUD started with a presentation about a system that comparable with Stratego, but written in Java. The system is called TOM and it has some very nice properties. They borrowed some features of Stratego and I hope we also will borrow some of their features. The small features, like matching on a sort without specifying the number of children or the not-match, are most likely not difficult to implement but useful additions to Stratego. They also showed an eclipse-plugin for their project and a graphical debugger, great things to have and very useful. Another project that is added to the list of things to checkout.

Another connection between Stratego and Java was presented by Karl Trygve Kalleberg. He showed the Spoofax project, which also holds a plugin for Eclipse. I haven't really thought about looking at this for the syntax highlighter for Context, but it might be a good idea to check how he did this.

Bernd Fischer gave a presentation about what he wanted to get from the Stratego community. Some of the ideas could also be useful for other Stratego developers, but most of his wishes could probably be solved by implementing a separate library for ACI1-terms. Some of the problems that he mentioned are actually handled by MathPert, so he might want to take a look at it.

The talk of Alexandre Borghi about vectorization was a bit to technical for me. I think I understand why you want it, but could not figure out completely how everything worked. I do not have a problem with this, I do not intend to use it in the near future, but other people will certainly find it interesting.

A presentation that was really interesting for myself was the presentation of Bogdan Dumitriu. He did his master thesis on improving support for data-flow transformations for Object-Oriented programs. Many ideas from his thesis and his talk are very useful for me and the PHP-Sat project, so I am definitely going to read the complete thesis. His support for break- and continue-constructs can easily be added to PHP-Sat and his ideas about customized transformations are definitely cool. As soon as a get a copy of the thesis, and some spare time, I will write a blog about these cool subjects.

My own version of the SUD ended with the presentation of Karl Trygve Kalleberg and Valentin David in which they present some ideas for extending Stratego. Some of the extensions, like an attribute grammar system, are already implemented in Transformers and look interesting. Other proposal are still in the 'this-would-be-a-nice-idea'-stage, so we will have to wait and see what the future brings us.

To conclude this roundup I wanted to say that the whole experience was very cool. It was nice to see what other people are doing with Stratego and was a good opportunity to do some feature-requests. I am already looking forward to the SUD of next year.

The SUD also gave raise to a great quote coming from Pierre-Ettienne Moreau which I probably will going to use more often. The quote displays a great sense of a pragmatic attitude which really appeals to me. During the presentation about TOM Pierre-Ettienne explained some side-effect that could occur during the application of a strategy. After someone asked him whether it was pure he replied:

..it is not pure, but it is practical.