CRISTAL Research team

Typed programming, modularity and compilation

  • Leader : Xavier Leroy
  • Research center(s) : Paris - Rocquencourt
  • Field : Symbolic systems
  • Theme : Reliability and safety of software

Team presentation

The Cristal group works on the design and formalization of programming languages. The main aim is to increase the robustness of computer applications and the speed with which they can be developed.

Robustness and speed of development are increased by the use of expressive and reliable programming languages. The research carried out by the Cristal group aims to provide such languages and to study their properties from a formal point of view. The team develops Caml, a powerful high-level programming language, with portable implementations. The language allows mixing different programming styles (imperative, functional object-oriented). The Caml-Light system, with its simple design (no object-orientation, a simple module system) works well without requiring a powerful machine and is specially useful for teaching programming courses. Objective Caml adds modular and object-oriented features, and is equipped with an efficient compiler. It enables the development of large and efficient applications.

Research themes

  • Type systems.
  • Static analyses.
  • Foundations of object-oriented programming.
  • Design and compilation of high-level programming languages.

International and industrial relations

Keywords: Compilation Separate compilation Programming environment Software engineering Code generation Lambda-calculus Functional programming Typing

Inria Headquarters and research centres

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