Samuel D. Conte Distinguished Lecture

10-31-2005

Type-Safe C

Monday, October 31, 2005
Morgan Entrepreneurship Center, Rm. 121 at 3:30pm

ABSTRACT:

Type-safe languages, such as Java, rule out a wide variety of failures and attacks including buffer overruns, format-string attacks, and general memory corruption. Yet most of our critical systems software is coded in type-unsafe C. Throwing out all of the legacy C and re-coding it in Java is simply too expensive. Furthermore, most type-safe languages, including Java, do not provide the degree of control and interoperability needed for low-level software, such as device drivers and garbage collectors.

To address these concerns, we have been exploring techniques for bringing type-safety guarantees to C code without sacrificing the aspects that make writing C code attractive to systems programmers.

BIO:

Greg Morrisett received his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Richmond (1989) and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (1995). He spent about seven years on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. In the 2002-03 academic year, he took a sabbatical at Microsoft's Cambridge Research Laboratory. In January of 2004, he moved to Harvard University.

 

Hosted by the Purdue University Department of Computer Science. A reception will be held after the talk. For additional information please call 765-494-9431 or email piegza@cs.purdue.edu.