Functional Programming for Systems Software
Projects | | Links: Paper | C Implementation | LC Implementation
Summary
This thesis presents a case study of Habit, a functional language with built-in functionality for low level programming. Habit was designed at Portland State University by the High Assurance Systems Programming team, aiming to bridge the gap between a high-level language that minimizes potential errors and the low level capabilities and efficiency of a language like C. To test how well Habit meets this goal I implemented a page table in both C and a prototype of Habit, LC, to compare and contrast the implementations. I found Habit to be an interesting and potentially powerful language, but also unfortunately encountered a bug in the compiler that prevented me from finishing the page table. There were also some feature gaps I felt should be addressed, that I discuss in the paper. My hope is to see the continued development of Habit so that it becomes a more reliable and fleshed out language.
