Project
There will be a final course project to be completed over the last several weeks of the course. The project will involve extending the design and implementation of the programming language and its compiler that we will develop throughout the semester.
For your project you should turn in your extension code, a directory of examples that showcase your extension and the differences in behavior compared to the original language, and a short paragraph describing anything you found interesting. Submission will be handled by gradescope, with more details to follow.
The suggested deadline is the last date of classes - May 11th - to avoid overlap with finals week. That said, you’re free to take a few extra days and submit after that deadline until the nominal date of the final exam (which would have been on Tuesday, May 18th if it was happening). That is a strict deadline, not imposed by me, so make sure you have turned in your projects by then.
As a first step, you have to pick a project idea as your "assignment" for this week. Just write a short paragraph with your project of choice: what you hope to accomplish and a high-level description of your approach. This assignment should be live on Gradescope.
Here are some project ideas that have been discussed throughout the semester:
Error handling. Currently, our languages return a not-very-informative ’err symbol when things go wrong. Real languages offer a lot more information: the reason that something went wrong, context, expressions involved, file name, line numbers, etc. This project would aim to improve the error reporting for Loot. Improving that behavior for an interpreter is pretty straightforward and should be an easy first step for this project until you’re happy with the output error messages. Porting that better error behavior on the compiler is a bit more involved - there are multiple possible approaches to this, but hacking on the runtime system is always an option!
Typing Loot. We have discussed typing for Hustle and its implications in the compiler (deleting a whole lot of assertions), as well as typing for a simple lambda calculus. This project would aim to combine the two threads, implementing a type system on top of Loot. There are interesting design decisions here, so feel free to reach out to talk about them!
Loot Optimizations. Sky’s the limit here. You can try high-level optimizations (e.g. inlining, lambda lifting, dead-code elimination, partial evaluation, etc.) or low-level ones (register allocation, register-based calling conventions etc.). Optimizations can be tricky to get right, so make sure you reuse all the unit tests we have provided throughout the semester and expand upon them!
Whatever feature you want to add! Get in touch to discuss whether its scope is appropriate for a final project.