Don Syme
ABSTRACT
Language-integrated meta-programming and extensible compilation have been recurring themes of programming languages since the invention of LISP. A recent real-world application of these techniques is the use of small meta-programs to specify database queries, as used in the Microsoft LINQ extensions for .NET. It is important that .NET languages such as F# are able to leverage the functionality provided by LINQ and related components for heterogeneous execution, both for pragmatic reasons and as a first step toward applying more disciplined, formal approaches to these problems. This paper explores the use of a modest meta-programming extension to F# to access and leverage the functionality of LINQ and other components. We do this by demonstrating an implementation of language integrated SQL queries using the LINQ/SQLMetal libraries. We also sketch two other applications: the execution of data-parallel quoted F# programs on a GPU via the Accelerator libraries, and dynamic native-code compilation via LINQ.
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Index Terms
- Leveraging .NET meta-programming components from F#: integrated queries and interoperable heterogeneous execution
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Reviews
David Ruiz
.NET is an application framework by Microsoft that is undertaking a major revision with the 3.0 version. LINQ is a Microsoft project that aims to integrate some extensions to the .NET framework to embed languages for queries, sets, and transform operations. F# is a version of ML designed for scripting and strong typing. In this paper, the author shows some examples of meta-programming extensions to F#. He presents two embedded languages: FSQL, to integrate structured query language queries using the LINQ libraries, and FGPU, to provide parallel arrays that can be handled with a graphics processing unit (GPU). He also shows some examples of F# code to build simple queries and one-level nested queries and an example of F# code that implements the game of life with both two-dimensional arrays on the central processing unit and parallel arrays on the GPU. The paper is well written, readable, and gets to the point, but it only illustrates how meta-programming can be useful in the context of ML. The results might be useful to people who need to get a better understanding of meta-programming in the .NET platform, but it does not contribute to the theory of meta-programming. Online Computing Reviews Service
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