CRISTAL : Typed programming, modularity and compilation (project-team)

About the team : Project-Team site Activity report Videos and photos Research reports and theses Theme : Sym Symbolic systems Rocquencourt research unit

CRISTAL has been dissolved on 07/31/2005
It has been replaced by GALLIUM

Project-Team Presentation

The Cristal group works on the design and formalization of programming languages. The main aim is to increase the robustness of computer applications and the speed with which they can be developed.

Robustness and speed of development are increased by the use of expressive and reliable programming languages. The research carried out by the Cristal group aims to provide such languages and to study their properties from a formal point of view. The team develops Caml, a powerful high-level programming language, with portable implementations. The language allows mixing different programming styles (imperative, functional object-oriented). The Caml-Light system, with its simple design (no object-orientation, a simple module system) works well without requiring a powerful machine and is specially useful for teaching programming courses. Objective Caml adds modular and object-oriented features, and is equipped with an efficient compiler. It enables the development of large and efficient applications.

Research themes

• Type systems.
• Static analyses.
• Foundations of object-oriented programming.
• Design and compilation of high-level programming languages.

International and industrial relations

• The Cristal group is in contact with the users (academic as well as industrial) of its two Caml implementations, in particular with the members of the Caml Consortium (http://caml.inria.fr/consortium/).
• The group is a member of the APPSEM Esprit Working Group (http://www.md.chalmers.se/Cs/Research/Semantics/APPSEM/index.html).
• Cristal is associated with researchers of Hyderabad University (India) on the theme of computational linguistics.

Scientific leader

Xavier LEROY     [homepage]
+33 1 39 63 55 61
Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr
Secretary : +33 1 39 63 52 07