Design, Evolution and
Use of KernelF
A new Booklet for your Reading Pleasure
This year I had the honour of being invited
to give the keynote at the ICMT 2018 conference in Toulouse, France. I talked
about about KernelF, the functional language we have built in MPS.
What is interesting about KernelF are the
design decisions that result from it being used at the core of DSLs targeted
mostly at non-programmers. And it does not need powerful meta-programming
facilities to be embeddable and extensible, because this “magic” is provided by
the MPS language workbench on which KernelF relies.
I wrote a 100 page booklet to accompany the
talk (I submitted only 50 pagesto
the proceedings). The booklet contains a discussion of the design goals, some
specific design decisions, how the language evolved over its (admittedly not
yet very long) life, three case studies for DSLs built on top of it, as well as
a language reference and the obligatory appendix on language development with
MPS. And the booklet continues with the tradition of putting a beautiful glider
on the cover :-)
Get the paper from my Books and Booklet page. KernelF itself is
open source as part of the IETS3 project.