Climbing Up the Semantic Tower -- at Runtime

Abstract: Software exists at multiple levels of abstraction, where each more concrete level is an implementation of the more abstract level above, in a semantic tower of compilers and/or interpreters. First-class implementations are a reflection protocol to navigate this tower at runtime: they enable changing the underlying implementation of a computation while it is running. Key is a generalized notion of safe points that enable observing a computation at a higher-level than that at which it runs, and therefore to climb up the semantic tower, when at runtime most existing systems only ever allow but to go further down. The protocol was obtained by extracting the computational content of a formal specification for implementations and some of their properties. This approach reconciles two heretofore mutually exclusive fields: Semantics and Runtime Reflection.