There are myriads of improvements that a programming language can offer: from enhancements aimed at minimizing the amount of code programmers must write to various analyses that help programmers better understand and control program behavior. As the number and complexity of programming language features increases, it becomes harder to account for their interactions. To solve this problem, Wyvern—a pure, statically typed, object-oriented programming language—provides an easy-to-reason-about framework that supports addition of programming language features. Wyvern represents core programming language constructs as objects, which creates a level playing field for a diverse set of features and analyses, such as sandboxing, information flow analysis, and security analysis, that can be performed both statically and dynamically.

At the workshop, we will present Wyvern’s approach of the unified translation of programming constructs to objects and exemplify how the translation supports the development of new programming language features. Furthermore, we will discuss how the approach can simplify implementation of current programming language features and analyses as well as how it can foster the development of desired, but unexplored, features.