Goals of the Workshop

A recurring theme in many papers at ICFP, and in the research of many ICFP attendees, is the interaction of higher-order programming with various kinds of effects: storage effects, I/O, control effects, concurrency, etc. While effects are of critical importance in many applications, they also make it hard to build, maintain, and reason about one's code. Higher-order languages (both functional and object-oriented) provide a variety of abstraction mechanisms to help "tame" or "encapsulate" effects (e.g. monads, ADTs, ownership types, typestate, first-class events, transactions, Hoare Type Theory, session types, substructural and region-based type systems), and a number of different semantic models and verification technologies have been developed in order to codify and exploit the benefits of this encapsulation (e.g. bisimulations, step-indexed Kripke logical relations, higher-order separation logic, game semantics, various modal logics). But there remain many open problems, and the field is highly active.

The goal of the HOPE workshop is to bring researchers from a variety of different backgrounds and perspectives together to exchange new and exciting ideas concerning the design, semantics, implementation, and verification of higher-order effectful programs.

We want HOPE to be as informal and interactive as possible. The program will thus involve a combination of invited talks, contributed talks about work in progress, and open-ended discussion sessions. There will be no published proceedings, but participants will be invited to submit working documents, talk slides, etc. to be posted on this website.

Program for August 30, 2015

Invited Talk

The Rust programming language

Aaron Turon, Mozilla

Rust is a new systems language, initially developed at Mozilla, which recently hit its 1.0 release. The goal of the language is to provide type and memory safety together with low-level control and performance predictability -- all while keeping programming practical. In particular, Rust guarantees safety without the use of a garbage collector, and provides for the kind of “zero cost abstractions” found in languages like C++.

This talk will focus on the core concepts that make Rust work: ownership and borrowing. It will show how these concepts are applied to combine safety and control for sequential programming. It will also go into some detail on how the same techniques help with concurrent programming, in particular how they guarantee freedom from data races and help rehabilitate shared-state concurrency.

Call for Talk Proposals

We solicit proposals for contributed talks. We recommend preparing proposals of at most 2 pages, in either plain text or PDF format. However, we will accept longer proposals or submissions to other conferences, under the understanding that PC members are only expected to read the first two pages of such longer submissions. When submitting talk proposals, authors should specify how long a talk the speaker wishes to give. By default, contributed talks will be 30 minutes long, but proposals for shorter or longer talks will also be considered. Speakers may also submit supplementary material (e.g. a full paper, talk slides) if they desire, which PC members are free (but not expected) to read.

We are interested in talks on all topics related to the interaction of higher-order programming and computational effects. Talks about work in progress are particularly encouraged. If you have any questions about the relevance of a particular topic, please contact the PC chairs, Lars Birkedal (birkedal@cs.au.dk) and Neel Krishnaswami (N.Krishnaswami@cs.bham.ac.uk).

Workshop Organization

Previous Editions of the Workshop

This is the 4th edition of the HOPE workshop.

The 3rd edition of the workshop was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in August 2014.

The 2nd edition of the workshop was held in Boston, Massachusetts, in September 2013.

The 1st edition of the workshop was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2012.