Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and ReflectionMETA 2016

The Meta’16 workshop aims to bring together researchers working on metaprogramming and reflection, as well as users building applications, language extensions such as contracts, or software tools. With the changing hardware and software landscape, and increased heterogeneity of systems, metaprogramming becomes an important research topic to handle the associate complexity once more. Contributions to the workshop are welcome on a wide range of topics related to design, implementation, and application of metaprogramming techniques, as well as empirical studies on and typing for such systems and languages.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

The heterogeneity of mobile computing, cloud applications, multicore architectures, and other systems leads to increasing complexity of software and requires new approaches to programming languages and software engineering tools. To manage the complexity, we require generic solutions that can be adapted to specific application domains or use cases, making metaprogramming an important topic of research once more. However, the challenges with metaprogramming are still manifold. They start with fundamental issues such as typing of reflective programs, continue with practical concerns such as performance and tooling, and reach into the empirical field to understand how metaprogramming is used and how it affects software maintainability. Thus, while industry accepted metaprogramming on a wide scale with Ruby, Scala, JavaScript and others, academia still needs to answer a wide range of questions to bring it to the same level of convenience, tooling, and programming styles to cope with the increasing complexity of software systems.

This workshop aims to explore meta-level technologies that help tackling the heterogeneity, scalability and openness requirements of emerging computations platforms.

Topics of Interest

The workshop is a venue for all approaches that embrace metaprogramming:

• from static to dynamic techniques
• reflection, meta-level architectures, staging, open language runtimes applications to middleware, frameworks, and DSLs
• optimization techniques to minimize runtime overhead
• contract systems, or typing of reflective programs reflection and metaobject protocols to enable tooling
• case studies and evaluation of such techniques, e.g., to build applications, language extensions, or tools
• empirical evaluation of metaprogramming solutions
• security in reflective systems and capability-based designs
• meta-level architectures and reflective middleware for modern runtime platforms (e.g. IoT, cyber-physical systems, mobile/cloud/grid computing, etc)
• surveys, conceptualization, and taxonomization of existing approaches

In short, we invite contributions to the workshop on a wide range of topics related to design, implementation, and application of reflective APIs and meta-programming techniques, as well as empirical studies and typing for such systems and languages.

Workshop Format and Submissions

This workshop welcomes the presentation of new ideas and emerging problems as well as mature work as part of a mini-conference format. Furthermore, we plan interactive brainstorming and demonstration sessions between the formal presentations to enable an active exchange of ideas.

The workshop papers will be put on the workshop website, if not requested otherwise by the authors, but they are not part of formal proceedings. Papers are to be submitted using the ACM sigplanconf style at 10pt font size. See http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/.

• demos and posters: 1-page abstract
• position and work-in-progress paper: 1-4 pages
• technical paper: up to 8 pages

Demos, posters, position and work-in-progress papers can be submitted on a second, later deadline to discuss the latest results and current work.

For the submission, please use the submission system at: https://meta16.hotcrp.com/

Important Dates

• abstract submission: August 8th, 2016
• paper submission: August 15th, 2016
• notification: September 5th, 2016
• late submission for demos, position or work-in-progress papers: September 9th, 2016
• late notification: September 23rd, 2016
• all deadlines: Anywhere on Earth (AoE), i.e., GMT/UTC−12:00 hour
• workshop: October 30th, 2016

Program Committee

The program committee consists of the organizers and the following reviewers:

Marcus Denker, INRIA, France
Robert Hirschfeld, HPI, Germany
Ralf Lämmel, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Hridesh Rajan, Iowa State University, USA
Romain Rouvoy, University Lille 1 and INRIA, France
Eric Tanter, University of Chile, Chile
Tom Van Cutsem, Bell Labs, Belgium
Tijs van der Storm, CWI, Netherlands
Takuo Watanabe, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Workshop Organizers

Shigeru Chiba, University of Tokyo
Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Stefan Marr, Johannes Kepler University Linz