Bootstrapping the Statix Meta-Language

Boris Janssen


Date: Mon, April 17, 2023
Time: 10:30
Room: Echo Arena
Note: This is a Masters defense.


The Statix meta-language has been developed in order to simplify the definition of static semantics in programming languages. A high-level static semantics definition of a language in Statix can be used to generate a type-checker, hence abstracting over the shared implementation details. Statix should be able to express the static semantics of it- self as well. The process of defining a language using itself is called bootstrapping. In this thesis we discuss the bootstrapping of the Statix meta-language within the Spoofax lan- guage workbench. The bootstrapping of a type-system domain specific language hasn’t previously been discussed in existing work. It acts as an interesting case study on the use of Statix to define semantics for a constraint-based declarative language as well as the use of Statix throughout a full compiler pipeline. In addition bootstrapping grants Statix a more expressive type system, which enables the future development of the language.

Throughout this thesis we discuss the components of the Statix compiler and explain how these changed as part of the bootstrapping process. The correctness is validated by comparing compiled specifications of the bootstrapped compiler and the existing ref- erence solution for alpha equivalence. We also provide a brief indication of the perfor- mance of the bootstrapped Statix compiler.

The bootstrapped compiler is believed to be correct, but does currently not perform to the desired standard. The compiler is successful on smaller language projects, but has a massive growth in compile time when it is used on larger, more complex language projects. This means future work is needed in order for it to be incorporated into the language workbench.

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