Parallelism, concurrency, and distribution
Concurrency management is at the heart of diffuse programming. Since the execution platforms are highly heterogeneous, many different concurrency principles and models may involved. Asynchronous concurrency is the basis of shared-memory process handling within multiprocessor or multicore computers, of direct or fifo-based message passing in distributed networks, and of fifo- or interrupt-based event handling in web-based human-machine interaction or sensor handling. Synchronous or quasi-synchronous concurrency is the basis of signal processing, of real-time control, and of safety-critical information acquisition and display. Interfacing existing devices based on these different concurrency principles within HOP or other diffuse programming languages will require better understanding of the underlying concurrency models and of the way they can nicely cooperate, a currently ill-resolved problem.
Web and functional programming
We are studying new paradigms for programming Web applications that rely on multi-tier functional programming. This research has been initiated in the Mimosa team, the predecessor of the Indes team, where we have created the new Web programming environment named Hop. It relies on a single formalism for programming the server-side and the client-side of the applications as well as for configuring the execution engine.
Hop is a functional language based on the Scheme programming language. That is, it is a strict functional language, fully polymorphic, supporting side effects, and dynamically type-checked. Hop is implemented as an extension of the Bigloo compiler that we develop. In the past, we have extensively studied static analyses (type systems and inference, abstract interpretations, as well as classical compiler optimizations) to improve the efficiency of compilation in both space and time.
Security of diffuse programs
The main goal of our security research is to provide scalable and rigorous language-based techniques that can be integrated into multi-tier compilers to enforce the security of diffuse programs. Research on language-based security has been carried on before in both the Mimosa and Everest teams. In particular previous research has focused on controlling information flow to ensure confidentiality.
Typical language-based solutions to these problems are founded on static analysis, logics, provable cryptography, and compilers that generate correct code by construction. Relying on the multi-tier programming language Hop that tames the complexity of writing and analysing secure diffuse applications, we are studying language-based solutions to prominent web security problems such as code injection and cross-site scripting, to name a few.
