AbleC

AbleC is an implementation of C, at the C11 standard, using Silver. This is used as a host language in our work on extensible languages.

See our OOPSLA 2017 paper: Reliable and Automatic Composition of Language Extensions to C: The ableC Extensible Language Framework.

To date we’ve developed a number of language extensions. These include extensions for:

  • Algebraic data types, with pattern matching
  • SQLite, with type-checked queries
  • Cilk, for task-based parallel programming
  • Regular expressions, with matching
  • An extension that combines these two to allow regular expressions to be used as patterns when matching on strings as part of an algebraic data type
  • Matrix features from MATLAB and a matlab function construct that generates the boilerplate FFI types and code for calling such functions from MATLAB
  • Term rewriting, inspired by the TOM system and Kiama
  • Closures / lambda-expressions
  • A partial demo of HALIDE-like extensions, a DSL for high performance matrix processing

These all pass the modular determinism analysis in Copper and the modular well-definedness analysis in Silver.

To get started with ableC, look here.