Luca Saiu — (some) publications

I wrote everything below when working at LIPN (Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université Paris-Nord), Institut Galilée, Université Paris 13, between 2007 and 2012.

Please also see my "talks" page.

PhD Thesis

GNU epsilon, an extensible programming language
Luca Saiu, defended on 2012-11-19
Advisors: Christophe Fouqueré, Jean-Vincent Loddo;
Reviewers: Emmanuel Chailloux, Michel Mauny;
Other jury members: Roberto Di Cosmo (president), Manuel Serrano, Basile Starynkevitch, Peter Van Roy.

Abstract:
Reductionism is a viable strategy for designing and implementing practical programming languages, leading to solutions which are easier to extend, experiment with and formally analyze.
We formally specify and implement an extensible programming language, based on a minimalistic first-order imperative core language plus strong abstraction mechanisms, reflection and self-modification features. The language can be extended to very high levels: by using Lisp-style macros and code-to-code transforms which automatically rewrite high-level expressions into core forms, we define closures and first-class continuations on top of the core.
Non-self-modifying programs can be analyzed and formally reasoned upon, thanks to the language simple semantics. We formally develop a static analysis and prove a soundness property with respect to the dynamic semantics.
We develop a parallel garbage collector suitable to multi-core machines to permit efficient execution of parallel programs.

Full text, black/white (PDF, 1.4MB).
Full text, color (PDF, 1.4MB).
Presentation slides (PDF, 800KB).

The version you find here contains some minor rephrasings and grammar improvements, compared to the "official" submitted version. However there is no difference in the actual content: in particular the document describes the GNU epsilon software frozen in its August 2012 state: several of the "future developments" hinted at in the text, including multiple backends with different data representation, pattern matching, and native compilation do exist and work now. I'll discuss some of the significant improvements in my blog, and in the software documentation when it's ready.

Peer-reviewed publications

About game theory:

How to correctly prune tropical trees
Jean-Vincent Loddo and Luca Saiu, 2010
Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation, Paris (France) 2010
- Paper (PDF). This is the arXiv version (identifier 1005.1475) but the text, formulas and figures are identical to what you find in the proceedings.
- aisc-2010--presentation.pdf (presentation in PDF).
A generalization of alpha-beta pruning using tropical algebras.

About Marionnet:

Status Report: Marionnet — How to Implement a Virtual Network Laboratory in Six Months and Be Happy
Jean-Vincent Loddo, Luca Saiu, 2007
ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on ML, Freiburg (Germany), 2007
- Paper (PDF, from Jean-Vincent's web site).
- marionnet-presentation--ml-2007.tar.gz (tarball with ODF presentation and images)
- marionnet-presentation--ml-2007.pdf (presentation exported to PDF; no animations, less spiffy)
This is a reasonably detailed description of how Marionnet is implemented.
Marionnet: a virtual network laboratory and simulation tool
Jean-Vincent Loddo, Luca Saiu, 2008
SimulationWorks, Marseille (France), 2008
- Paper (PDF, from Jean-Vincent's web site).
The first part is a simple user-oriented introduction to Marionnet. Section 7 outlines a possible usage scenario for Marionnet, not related to teaching.

Drafts and Technical Reports

Luca Saiu
Last modified: 2013-05-02