Section: New Results

Skeletal Semantics

Participants : Guillaume Ambal, Nathanael Courant, Thomas Jensen, Adam Khayam, Louis Noizet, Vincent Rebiscoul, Alan Schmitt.

The work on skeletal semantics [5], a modular and formal way to describe semantics or programming languages, has intensified during 2019. We have continued to develop necro , a tool to manipulate skeletal semantics and generate interpreters in OCaml, mechanized semantics in Coq, and static analyzers. The code is available online (). Several interns and PhD students are also working on skeletal semantics.

Nathanaël Courant has designed a control-flow analyzer for languages written as skeletal semantics. This work is now extended by Vincent Rebiscoul to certify the analyzer.

Louis Noizet is studying the formalization in Coq of natural semantics from skeletal semantics. To this end, he extended the necro tool to automatically generate a Coq formalization. Louis is also very involved in the maintenance of necro.

Guillaume Ambal is studying the language features that can be captured using skeletal semantics, focusing on concurrency and distribution. In this setting, he is building an approach to automatically derive a small-step semantics form a big-step one.

Adam Khayam is writing a formal semantics of the Hop multitier language, an extension of JavaScript to write web applications. As a first step, he is writing a skeletal semantics of JavaScript to validate that our approach scale for complex and sizable semantics.