Microsoft's Common Language Runtime:
Is It Dynamic Enough?

Jim Miller
Microsoft Corporation

Tuesday 5th December 2006
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) was released to the public in 2000 and was touted as a multi-language runtime. But for the first five years of its commercial life it has been mostly used for executing statically typed languages (Visual Basic, Java, C#, Eiffel, C++). There has been considerable skepticism about its ability to support more dynamic languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, and Scheme. This talk, by one of the designers of the CLR type system, introduces recent work on implementing Python on top of the CLR. I'll also discuss how the CLR is likely to evolve in the future to make it easy to build other dynamic languages on top of it.

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Jim Miller has designed and implemented a number of novel and useful real-world systems over more than thirty years, including: the Microsoft Common Language Runtime; the PICS system for Internet content selection (1995); the first public implementation of the Dylan programming language (1993); an early complete programming system for a parallel computer (1989); the first portable implementation of the programming language Scheme (1983); the first full-function electronic mail system (1976); the first source-level debugging system for a high-level language (1972).
      Prior to his work at Microsoft in 1998, Jim created and headed the Computers and Society domain at the World Wide Web Consortium to work on issues ranging from child protection to electronic commerce to privacy protection to accessibility for the disabled. He has also been on the research staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the faculty of Brandeis University, the research staff of Digital Equipment Corporation, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), and Open Software Foundation.

Host: Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.