Luca Saiu — (most) publications

My Erdős number is a quite unspectacular 4: Paul Erdős, Aviezri S. Fraenkel, Michel Rigo, Jacques Sakarovitch, Luca Saiu.

I wrote the entries dated between 2007 and 2012 when working at LIPN (Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université Paris-Nord), Institut Galilée, Université Paris 13, and the 2014 entry when working at Télécom ParisTech and LRDE-EPITA.

Please also see my "talks" page.

• 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, 1.1MB).
  • Full text, color (PDF, 1.1MB).
  • Presentation slides (PDF, 800KB).
Compared to the "official" submitted test the version you find here contains some minor rephrasings and grammar improvements, plus the occasional correction — explicitly marked as such. However there is no difference in the actual content: in particular the document describes the GNU epsilon software frozen in its state as of August 2012: more or less all of the "future developments" hinted at in the text, including multiple backends with different data representations, pattern matching and native compilation do exist and work now, among many other improvements devised later. I may discuss some of the significant improvements in my blog, and in the software documentation when it's ready. The epsilon mailing lists are the best venue for discussion.

(Some) peer-reviewed publications

• About Vaucanson and automata:
  • A Type System for Weighted Automata and Rational Expressions
    Akim Demaille, Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Sylvain Lombardy, Luca Saiu and Jacques Sakarovitch, 2014
    International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA), Gießen, Germany, 2014
    
    • Paper (PDF, 1200KB)
    • Presentation slides, mostly written by Akim Demaille (PDF, 6MB)
    • Presentation screencast recorded after the conference (WebM, 22MB)
    A description of the Vaucanson type system and its C++ implementation. I'm particularly satisfied with this paper: it is nontrivial and still it came out very accessible, from both the typing and the automata point of view.
• 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
    
    • The preprint paper rebuilt in 2022, identical to the 2007 “version of record” except for page headers and footers (PDF, 808kiB).
    • The published “Version of record” paper (PDF, external link to 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, external link to 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.

• About garbage collection:
  • Scalable BIBOP garbage collection for parallel functional programs on multi-core machines
    Luca Saiu, draft, 2011
    • Paper (PDF).
    An application of the BIBOP technique to the problem of improving memory locality in functional language implementations.

---

---

Luca Saiu
Last modified: 2022-11-09

---

Copyright © 2012-2016, 2018-2022 Luca Saiu
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.