Dr. Lionel Parreaux and MPhil Student Andong Fan Honored with the Distinguished Artifact Award at ECOOP 2023

Dr. Lionel Parreaux and his student Mr. Andong Fan won the esteemed Distinguished Artifact Award at the 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023) for their work titled "Super-Charging Object-Oriented Programming Through Precise Typing of Open Recursion".

About the Award-winning Paper

The awarded paper presents a unique variation of object-oriented programming built around three simple and orthogonal constructs: classes for storing object state, interfaces for expressing object types, and mixins for reusing and overriding implementations.

The paper introduces a novel feature called precisely-typed open recursion that can enhance the expressiveness of mixins. This feature uses annotations for 'this' and 'super' to express the requirements of any given partial method implementation on the types of the current object and the inherited definitions.

Not assigning types and subtyping relationships to mixins enables compositions even when the overriding and overridden methods have incomparable types. Along with the advanced type inference and structural typing support provided by the MLscript programming language, this offers an elegant and powerful solution to the Expression Problem.

About ECOOP and Distinguished Artifact Award

ECOOP is Europe's longest-standing annual Programming Languages conference, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and students to share their ideas and experiences in all topics related to programming languages, software development, systems and applications. ECOOP welcomes high quality research papers relating to these fields in a broad sense.

ECOOP has a long-standing tradition of offering artifact evaluation dating back to 2013. Artifacts that go beyond expectations of quality are eligible to receive Distinguished Artifact award. The selection procedure is based on review scores and feedback from the artifact evaluation committee.

We extend our congratulations to Andong Fan and Prof. Lionel Parreaux for their exceptional accomplishment!

Award Announcement. More details about the Paper and the TACO Lab.