Changes in doc/theses/aaron_moss/phd/background.tex [2a9d12d:ce00317]

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• doc/theses/aaron_moss/phd/background.tex (modified) (1 diff)

doc/theses/aaron_moss/phd/background.tex

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 \chapter{Background}
 
-This is the background. Basically, need to cite Ditchfield\cite{Ditchfield92}, Bilson\cite{Bilson03}, and Moss~\etal\cite{Moss18}
+\CFA{} adds a number of features to C, some of them providing significant increases to the expressive power of the language, but all designed to maintain the existing procedural programming paradigm of C and to be as orthogonal as possible with each other. 
+To provide background for the contributions in subsequent chapters, this chapter provides a summary of the features of \CFA{} at the time this work was conducted.
+
+The core design of \CFA{} is laid out in Glen Ditchfield's 1992 PhD thesis, \emph{Contextual Polymorphism}\cite{Ditchfield92}; in that thesis, Ditchfield lays out the theoretical underpinnings of the \CFA{} polymorphism model. 
+Building on Ditchfield's design for contextual polymorphism as well as KW-C\cite{Buhr94a}, an earlier set of (largely syntactic) extensions to C, Richard Bilson\cite{Bilson03} built the first version of the \CFA{} compiler, \CFACC{}, in the early 2000's. 
+This early \CFACC{} provided basic functionality, but incorporated a number of poor algorithmic choices due to a rushed implementation time frame, and as such lacked the runtime performance required for practical use; this thesis is substantially concerned with rectifying those deficits. 
+
+The \CFA{} project was revived in 2015 with the intention of building a production-ready language and compiler; at the time of this writing, both \CFA{} and \CFACC{} have been under active development continuously since. 
+As this development has been proceeding concurrently with the work described in this thesis, the state of \CFA{} has been somewhat of a moving target; however, Moss~\etal\cite{Moss18} provides a reasonable summary of the current design of \CFA{}. 
+Notable features added during this period include generic types[Chapter~\ref{generic-chap}], constructors and destructors\cite{Schluntz17}, improved support for tuples\cite{Schluntz17}, reference types\cite{Moss18}, first-class concurrent and parallel programming support\cite{Delisle18}, as well as numerous pieces of syntactic sugar and the start of an idiomatic standard library\cite{Moss18}.
+