Changeset 8adcfee for doc/theses

Timestamp:

Feb 22, 2019, 6:19:09 PM (6 years ago)

Author:

Aaron Moss <a3moss@…>

Branches:

ADT, aaron-thesis, arm-eh, ast-experimental, cleanup-dtors, enum, forall-pointer-decay, jacob/cs343-translation, jenkins-sandbox, master, new-ast, new-ast-unique-expr, pthread-emulation, qualifiedEnum

Children:

11b3053

Parents:

d065ded

Message:

thesis: first draft of conclusion

File:

• doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/conclusion.tex (modified) (1 diff)

doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/conclusion.tex

@@ -1 +1 @@
 \chapter{Conclusion}
 
-Wrap it up --- Done, done done.
+Decades after its first standardization, the C language remains a widely-used tool and a vital part of the software development landscape. 
+The \CFA{} language under development at the University of Waterloo represents an evolutionary modernization of C with expressive modern language features paired with strong C backwards-compatibility. 
+This thesis has contributed to those project goals in a variety of ways, including the addition of a generic types language feature (Chapter~\ref{generic-chap}) and refinement of the \CFA{} overload selection rules to produce a more expressive and intuitive model (Section~\ref{conv-cost-sec}). 
+Based on the technical contribution of the resolver prototype system (Section~\ref{rp-features-sec}), I have also made significant improvements to \CFA{} compilation performance, including un-combined bottom-up expression traversal (Section~\ref{arg-parm-matching-sec}), deferred-cached assertion satisfaction (Section~\ref{assn-sat-sec}), and a novel persistent union-find type environment data structure (Section~\ref{env-persistent-union-find}). 
+The combination of these practical improvements and added features significantly improve the viability of \CFA{} as a practical programming language.
+
+Further improvements to \CFA{} are still possible, however. 
+One area suggested by this work is development of a scheme for user-defined conversions; to integrate properly with the \CFA{} conversion model, there would need to be a distinction between safe and unsafe conversions, and possibly a way to denote conversions as explicit-only or non-chainable. 
+Another place for ongoing effort is improvement of compilation performance; I believe the most promising direction for that is rebuilding the \CFA{} compiler on a different framework than Bilson's \CFACC{}. 
+The resolver prototype presented in this work has good performance and already has the basics of \CFA{} semantics implemented, as well as many of the necessary core data structures, and would be a viable candidate for a new compiler architecture. 
+An alternate approach would be to fork an existing C compiler such as Clang~\cite{Clang}, which would need to be modified to use one of the resolution algorithms discussed here, as well as various other features introduced by Bilson~\cite{Bilson03}.