Welcome to the MedLibrary.org Wikipedia Supplement on BitC -- Please Click to Return to Front Page

BitC is a programming language currently being developed by researchers[1] at the Johns Hopkins University and The EROS Group, LLC, as part of the Coyotos project. The language has two primary objectives:

1. To merge the advances of modern programming languages; sound type systems with abstraction, sound and complete type inference, let-polymorphism, and mathematically grounded semantics — with the requirements of systems programming; first-class treatment of state, support for prescriptive low-level representation, explicitly unboxed types, and performance comparable to C.
2. Eventually, to support formal program verification of low-level systems programs, such as kernels/microkernels.

It is an innovative language in that it combines the concepts of higher-order functional programming languages like ML and Haskell with the close hardware interaction of low-level programming languages like C. The current language syntax is derived from the syntax of Lisp, but this is expected to be replaced as the language comes to its first release.

From the standpoint of programming language evolution, BitC's most important innovation is the first sound and complete type inference algorithm that handles generalized state and unboxing. With the recent (not yet implemented) addition of effect typing, BitC presents an interesting middle position between purely functional and traditionally state-oriented languages.

From the perspective of systems programmers, BitC may be more interesting for the fact that the non-optimizing research prototype compiler is delivering performance on early benchmarks that falls within 1% to 1.5% of C on comparable codes.

History

The goals for the BitC language were set out in 2004 in Towards a Verified, General-Purpose Operating System Kernel (html, pdf) presented at the 2004 NICTA OS Verification Workshop. Some details of the origins and early evolution of the language can be found in The Origins of the BitC Programming Language (html, pdf).

In 2006, Shapiro left Johns Hopkins to form The EROS Group, LLC, and the BitC project became a joint effort between the two organizations.

As the end of 2008 approaches, the specification for the first released version of the language and its compiler is converging rapidly into its final form, and the prototype compiler has demonstrated favorable performance on microbenchmarks.

Jonathan S. Shapiro has been a driving force behind both BitC[2] and Coyotos[3].

Status

BitC is currently under simultaneous development with the main Coyotos project. An early compiler for BitC, known as BitCC, was first released in an alpha form (v. 0.10.1) on June 17, 2006.

External links

• BitC homepage
• BitC Language Specification (html, pdf)
• BitC-dev mailing list archives
• Coyotos homepage
• Jonathan Shapiro's homepage

This computer language-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 7 November 2008, at 16:32.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "BitC".

The URL for this specific entry is:

• http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/BitC

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.