Be My Guest: Normalizing and Compiling Programs using a Host Language

Licentiatavhandling, 2020

In programming language research, normalization is a process of fundamental importance to the theory of computing and reasoning about programs.
In practice, on the other hand, compilation is a process that transforms programs in a language to machine code, and thus makes the programming
language a usable one. In this thesis, we investigate means of normalizing and compiling programs in a language using another language as the "host".
Leveraging a host to work with programs of a "guest" language enables reuse of the host's features that would otherwise be strenuous to develop.

The specific tools of interest are Normalization by Evaluation and Embedded Domain-Specific Languages, both of which rely on a host language for their purposes. These tools are applied to solve problems in three different domains: to show that exponentials (or closures) can be eliminated from a categorical combinatory calculus, to propose a new proof technique based on normalization for showing noninterference, and to enable the programming of resource-constrained IoT devices from Haskell.