Huawei–TACO Lab Mini Workshop
Last week, we were delighted to receive the visit of Dr. Vladimir Rubanov and Anton Soldatov from Huawei R&D. We held an improvised mini-workshop focusing on our many common research interests, especially in the context of the OpenHarmony and ArkTS projects.
On the one hand, OpenHarmony is a new open-source, distributed operating system framework for smart devices, whose development is spearheaded by Huawei. On the other hand, ArkTS is meant to provide a safe and performant programming language for OpenHarmony application development. To paraphrase from research material used at the workshop: ArkTS aims to become an efficient and modern general-purpose programming language for a wide area of development suitable for writing cross-platform mobile, desktop, and web applications as well as portable libraries. This brings many challenges in the areas of language design, interoperability, frontend extensibility and runtime improvements:
- ArkTS programs must be easy for developers to read and understand because the code is read more often than written;
- ArkTS must execute fast and consume as little power as possible because doing so is particularly critical on mobile devices which ArkTS targets;
- ArkTS must have a large common subset with TypeScript to ease learning and interoperability.
These goals are clearly aligned with our own research interests and overlap with MLscript’s design goals. Moreover, it is clear that we share similar design philosophies, which is what prompted us to hold this workshop in the first place.
We are looking forward to future collaborations and exchanges!
