Talk by Prof. Alex Potanin
at 14:00- on 2020 January 27th
Medium meeting room on the 2nd Floor, I-REF building,
The University of Tokyo.
Wyvern - Security by Design
by Alex Potanin, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
The engineering properties of programs derive from their design. As programs grow in scale and complexity, ensuring compliance with the overall design intent becomes more critical yet also more difficult. The goal of the Wyvern programming language is to help programmers cleanly express and enforce design as an integral part of programming. Wyvern accomplishes this with a capability-safe object model that expresses design constraints constructively, a strong system of types and effects to enforce abstractions at both component and object scales, and an extensible syntax that can express designs in a variety of domains while preserving important security and modularity properties. The talk will flesh out these design goals and demonstrate how the features of the language support them, while highlighting some research directions that have arisen from the language's goals.
Speaker: Associate Professor Alex Potanin from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand works on type systems for object-oriented programming languages. In the past he developed generic ownership and immutability showing how to provide object graph encapsulation and mutability guarantees while utilising type polymorphism and other advanced type checking features. He also worked on empirical studies on Java memory usage and collections designs including showing that incoming and outgoing references for object graphs form power law relations. Since 2013 he was co-leading a Wyvern Programming Language project together with Professor Jonathan Aldrich at Carnegie Mellon University - a novel object-based language for the web and IoT programming prioritising security considerations above all else during every language design and development decision. Alex is on sabbatical at Kyoto University (with Atsushi Igarashi) between December 2019 and March 2020.