The Fox Project

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Principal Investigators

Robert Harper, Professor
Peter Lee, Professor
Frank Pfenning, Associate Professor

Support

The Fox Project was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency CSTO under the title "The Fox Project: Advanced Languages for Systems Software", ARPA Order Number C533, issued by ESC/ENS under Contract Number F19628-95-C-0050 and under the title "The Fox Project: Advanced Development of Systems Software", ARPA Order Number 8313, issued by ESD/AVS under Contract Number F196228-91-C-0168.

Objective

The objective of the Fox Project is the development of language support for building safe, highly composable, and reliable systems. We seek to accomplish this by exploiting and advancing the state-of-the-art in programming language technology, including fundamental design principles, compiler technologies, and the mathematical underpinning of programming languages and logics. We demonstrate our results through language implementations and applications in systems software such as embedded systems or active networks, emphasizing those which must simultaneously be highly customizable, safe, and efficient.

The current emphasis is on applications for program composition in embedded systems.

Approach

The Fox Project is carrying out a comprehensive program of research to apply the theoretical foundations of programming languages (including ideas in type theory, formal semantics, and logic) to the development of tools and techniques for systems software in general and system software in particular. The main goal is the development of technologies for achieving modularity, efficiency, and safety in software systems, and then developing tools to support application of these technologies. We have divided our past and current research activities into several closely linked focus areas.

Please refer to these individual pages for recent talks and publications, software, collaborations, and further links.