research-article

Static TypeScript: an implementation of a static compiler for the TypeScript language

Authors:

Peli de Halleux,

Michał MoskalAuthors Info & Claims

MPLR 2019: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

Pages 105 - 116

https://doi.org/10.1145/3357390.3361032

Published: 21 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

While the programming of microcontroller-based embeddable devices typically is the realm of the C language, such devices are now finding their way into the classroom for CS education, even at the level of middle school. As a result, the use of scripting languages (such as JavaScript and Python) for microcontrollers is on the rise.

We present Static TypeScript (STS), a subset of TypeScript (itself, a gradually typed superset of JavaScript), and its compiler/linker toolchain, which is implemented fully in TypeScript and runs in the web browser. STS is designed to be useful in practice (especially in education), while being amenable to static compilation targeting small devices. A user’s STS program is compiled to machine code in the browser and linked against a precompiled C++ runtime, producing an executable that is more efficient than the prevalent embedded interpreter approach, extending battery life and making it possible to run on devices with as little as 16 kB of RAM (such as the BBC micro:bit).

This paper is primarily a description of the STS system and the technical challenges of implementing embedded programming platforms in the classroom.

References

[1]

Jonny Austin, Howard Baker, Thomas Ball, James Devine, Joe Finney, Peli de Halleux, Steve Hodges, Michal Moskal, and Gareth Stockdale. 2019. The BBC micro:bit – from the UK to the World. Commun. ACM (to appear) (2019).

[2]

BBC. 2017. BBC micro:bit celebrates huge impact in first year, with 90% of students saying it helped show that anyone can code. https: //www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2017/microbit-first-year .

[3]

Gavin M. Bierman, Martín Abadi, and Mads Torgersen. 2014. Understanding TypeScript. In ECOOP 2014 - Object-Oriented Programming -28th European Conference, Uppsala, Sweden, July 28 - August 1, 2014. Proceedings. 257–281.

Digital Library

[4]

Hans-J Boehm, Russ Atkinson, and Michael Plass. 1995. Ropes: an alternative to strings. Software: Practice and Experience 25, 12 (1995), 1315–1330.

Digital Library

[5]

Satish Chandra, Colin S. Gordon, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, Cole Schlesinger, Manu Sridharan, Frank Tip, and Young-Il Choi. 2016. Type inference for static compilation of JavaScript. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2016, part of SPLASH 2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 30 - November 4, 2016. 410–429.

Digital Library

[6]

Wontae Choi, Satish Chandra, George Necula, and Koushik Sen. 2015. SJS: A type system for JavaScript with fixed object layout. In International Static Analysis Symposium. Springer, 181–198.

[7]

James Devine, Joe Finney, Peli de Halleux, Michal Moskal, Thomas Ball, and Steve Hodges. 2018. MakeCode and CODAL: intuitive and efficient embedded systems programming for education. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems, LCTES 2018, Philadelphia, PA, USA, June 19-20, 2018. 19–30.

Digital Library

[8]

Evgeny Gavrin, Sung-Jae Lee, Ruben Ayrapetyan, and Andrey Shitov. 2015. Ultra Lightweight JavaScript Engine for Internet of Things. In SPLASH Companion 2015. 19–20.

[9]

Damien George. 2018. MicroPython. http://www.micropython.org .

[10]

Isaac Gouy. 2018. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. https: //benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/ .

[11]

Apple Inc. 2018. JetStream Benchmarks 1.1. https://www. browserbench.org/JetStream/in-depth.html .

[12]

Adafruit Industries. 2018. CircuitPython. https://github.com/adafruit/ circuitpython .

[13]

A. Rastogi, N. Swamy, C. Fournet, G. M. Bierman, and P. Vekris. 2015. Safe & Efficient Gradual Typing for TypeScript. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. 167–180.

Digital Library

[14]

G. Richards, F. Z. Nardelli, and J. Vitek. 2015. Concrete Types for TypeScript. In 29th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, ECOOP 2015. 76–100.

[15]

Samsung. 2018. JerryScript. http://jerryscript.org .

[16]

Sue Sentance, Jane Waite, Steve Hodges, Emily MacLeod, and Lucy Yeomans. 2017. "Creating Cool Stuff": Pupils’ Experience of the BBC Micro:Bit. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’17). ACM, 531–536.

Digital Library

[17]

Manuel Serrano. 2018. JavaScript AOT compilation. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages. ACM, 50–63.

Digital Library

[18]

Jeremy G. Siek and Walid Taha. 2007. Gradual Typing for Objects. In ECOOP 2007 - Object-Oriented Programming, 21st European Conference, Berlin, Germany, July 30 - August 3, 2007, Proceedings. 2–27.

Digital Library

[19]

Artifex Software. 2018. MuJS. https://mujs.com/ .

[20]

Cesanta Software. 2018. mJS. https://github.com/cesanta/mjs .

[21]

Patrick Soquet. 2017. XS7. https://www.moddable.com/XS7-TC-39 .

[22]

Sami Vaarala. 2018. DukTape. https://duktape.org/ .

[23]

Gordon Williams. 2017. Making Things Smart: Easy Embedded JavaScript Programming for Making Everyday Objects into Intelligent Machines. Maker Media.

Cited By

Suzuki GWatanabe TMoriguchi SErtl MKirsch C(2024)mruby on Resource-Constrained Low-Power Coprocessors of Embedded DevicesProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3679007.3685064(41-47)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679007.3685064
Mochizuki FYamazaki TChiba SErtl MKirsch C(2024)Interactive Programming for Microcontrollers by Offloading Dynamic Incremental CompilationProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3679007.3685062(28-40)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679007.3685062
Kraemer CGelder WHester J(2024)User-directed Assembly Code Transformations Enabling Efficient Batteryless Arduino ApplicationsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36595908:2(1-32)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659590
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Static TypeScript: an implementation of a static compiler for the TypeScript language
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
      1. Embedded software
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MPLR 2019: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

October 2019

171 pages

ISBN:9781450369770

DOI:10.1145/3357390

General Chair:
Antony Hosking
Australian National University, Australia / Data61 at CSIRO, Australia
,
Program Chair:
Irene Finocchi
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 October 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

MPLR '19

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

MPLR '19: 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

October 21 - 22, 2019

Athens, Greece

Upcoming Conference

ISSTA '25

Sponsor:
sigsoft

34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

June 25 - 28, 2025

Trondheim , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

12
Total Citations
View Citations
296
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)53
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 15 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Suzuki GWatanabe TMoriguchi SErtl MKirsch C(2024)mruby on Resource-Constrained Low-Power Coprocessors of Embedded DevicesProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3679007.3685064(41-47)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679007.3685064
Mochizuki FYamazaki TChiba SErtl MKirsch C(2024)Interactive Programming for Microcontrollers by Offloading Dynamic Incremental CompilationProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3679007.3685062(28-40)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679007.3685062
Kraemer CGelder WHester J(2024)User-directed Assembly Code Transformations Enabling Efficient Batteryless Arduino ApplicationsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36595908:2(1-32)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659590
Ball Tde Halleux PDevine JHodges SMoskal M(2024)Jacdac: Service-Based Prototyping of Embedded SystemsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564058:PLDI(692-715)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656405
Inoue AUgawa TChiba SBond MLee JPayer H(2024)A Managed Memory System for Micro Controllers with NOR Flash MemoryProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3652024.3665511(57-67)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652024.3665511
Sesha PBairagi SAbhishek KYadav DBharati R(2023)EzLang: A C Based Programming Language2023 7th International Conference On Computing, Communication, Control And Automation (ICCUBEA)10.1109/ICCUBEA58933.2023.10392258(1-5)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCUBEA58933.2023.10392258
Yu XTang WXiong TChen WHe JYang BQi Z(2023)Enhancing embedded systems development with TSAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-023-00404-x31:1Online publication date: 6-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10515-023-00404-x
Devine JMoskal Mde Halleux PBall THodges SD'Amone GGakure DFinney JUnderwood LHartley KKos POppenheim M(2022)Plug-and-play Physical Computing with JacdacProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35503176:3(1-30)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3550317
Serrano M(2021)Of JavaScript AOT compilation performanceProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34735755:ICFP(1-30)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473575
Moskal MBall TChatra ADevine Jde Halleux PHodges SKao SKnoll RNickel GRussell JWunderlich JZuniga D(2021)Web-based Programming for Low-cost Gaming HandheldsProceedings of the 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3472538.3472572(1-12)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3472538.3472572
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents