Meta’18: Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection

The Meta’18 workshop aims to bring together researchers working on metaprogramming and reflection, as well as users building applications, language extensions, or software tools using them. The changing hardware and software landscape, and the increased heterogeneity of systems make metaprogramming once more an important research topic to handle the associate complexity.

The challenges which metaprogramming faces are manifold. They start with typing of reflective programs, continue with performance and tooling, and reach into the empirical field to understand how metaprogramming is used and how it affects software maintainability. While industry accepted metaprogramming on a wide scale with Ruby, Scala, JavaScript and others, academia still needs to bring it to the same level of convenience, tooling, and understanding as for direct programming styles.

Contributions to the workshop are welcome on a wide range of topics related to the design, implementation, and application of metaprogramming techniques, as well as empirical studies on typing models for such systems and languages.

Proceedings are available online.

Invited Talks

Through a Glass, Darkly
James Noble

SemanticDB: a common data model for Scala developer tools
Eugene Burmako

GraalVM: Metaprogramming inside a Polyglot System
Daniele Bonetta

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

This workshop aims to explore meta-level technologies that help tackling the heterogeneity, scalability and openness requirements of emerging computations platforms.

Topics of Interest

The workshop is a venue for all approaches that embrace metaprogramming, from static to dynamic techniques:

• reflection, meta-level architectures, staging, open language runtimes applications to middleware, frameworks, and DSLs
• optimization techniques
• contract systems, or typing of reflective programs
• reflection and metaobject protocols to enable tooling
• case studies and evaluation of such techniques, e.g., to build applications, language extensions, or tools
• empirical evaluation of metaprogramming solutions
• security in reflective systems and capability-based designs
• meta-level architectures and reflective middleware for modern runtime platforms (e.g. IoT, cyber-physical systems, mobile/cloud/grid computing, etc)
• surveys, conceptualization, and taxonomization of existing approaches

In short, we invite contributions to the workshop on a wide range of topics related to design, implementation, and application of reflective APIs and meta-programming techniques, as well as empirical studies and typing for such systems and languages.

Workshop Format and Submissions

This workshop welcomes the presentation of new ideas and emerging problems as well as mature work as part of a mini-conference format. Furthermore, we plan interactive brainstorming and demonstration sessions between the formal presentations to enable an active exchange of ideas.

Papers submitted by the first deadline will be considered for publication in the ACM DL, if not requested otherwise by the authors. Thus, they will be part of SPLASH workshop proceedings. For all papers, use of the SIGPLAN acmart style is mandatory: http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/. Please use the provided double-column templates for Latex or Word.

• technical paper: max. 8 pages, excluding references
• position and work-in-progress paper: 1-4 pages, excluding references
• technology demos or a posters: 1-page abstract

Abstracts do not have to be submitted before the submission deadline.

Demos, posters, position and work-in-progress papers can be submitted on a second, later deadline to discuss the latest results and current work, but will not be considered for publication in the ACM DL.

For all submission, please use the submission system at:

https://meta18.hotcrp.com/

Contact information

For further inquiries, do not hesitate to contact the organizers via meta@soft.vub.ac.be