Bibliography Glow

This page presents a Bibliography regarding Glow itself, and directly relevant work by its authors. Our domain specific language, Glow, was designed chiefly by our Co-Founder François-René Rideau, formerly a researcher in Programming Language Semantics and Distributed Systems.

Publications on Glow itself

François-René Rideau, “Security through Clarity”, OWASP NYC Meetup, 2021.

Eric Czuleger, “Bringing Glow on Cardano”, Interview with François-René Rideau on the IOHK Blog, 2021.

François-René Rideau, “Simple Formally Verified DApps—and not just Smart Contracts”, EthCC[3], 2020.

François-René Rideau, “Glow Whitepaper”, January 2020.

Current related Projects by the Glow authors

François-René Rideau et al., Durabo: Unstoppable Message Feeds, 2021

François-René Rideau et al., AVOUM: Account View On-top-of UTXO Model, 2021

Glow's predecessor: Alacrity

Alacrity was the first DApp language designed by François-René Rideau, the author of Glow. It was based on the general ideas as Glow, but was built by a different team in an erstwhile startup using different technologies internally. Glow is a complete rewrite of Alacrity that takes the design further. The language has evolved in many directions, and the implementation includes an application runtime that can actually run the interactions on the blockchain.

Alacrity was completed in September 2019, at which time it had a website alacrity-lang.org, that was taken down in December 2020. The code is still visible for all to see in its github repository. To develop Alacrity, François-René Rideau notably contracted Jay McCarthy, a world specialist on End-Point Projection and on the verification of distributed software protocols, to write the first version of our compiler. Still, all the blockchain expertise and design was and remains François-René Rideau’s. Alex Knauth also contributed code to our compiler and our runtime. Here are some relevant publications by our co-authors, plus a few additional relevant articles as anchors:

Jay McCarthy and François-René Rideau, “Alacrity: A DSL for Simple, Formally-Verified DApps”, October 2019 (a variant of this paper was presented by Jay McCarthy at DevCon5)

François-René Rideau et al., “Alacris Whitepaper”, July 2019 (first draft completed, never released), also focused on scaling, though with many of the ideas of the language.

François-René Rideau, “Composing Contracts without Special Provisions — using Blockchain History”, Hackernoon, April 2019.

François-René Rideau, “Language Abstraction for Verifiable Blockchain Distributed Applications”, April 2019 (with video from IOHK Summit 2019)

François-René Rideau, “Why Developing on Blockchain is Hard—Part 2: Computing Proper Collateral”. Hackernoon, March 2019.

François-René Rideau, “Why Developing on Blockchain is Hard—Part 1: Posting Transactions”. Hackernoon, December 2018.

François-René Rideau, Binding Blockchains Together With Accountability Through Computability Logic, June 2018 (with video from LambdaConf 2018)

François-René Rideau, “Legicash FaCTS: Fast Cryptocurrency Transactions, Securely”, our original Whitepaper, released March 2018. It focused on a scaling solution that we may some day implement. Some of the underlying ideas included foundations for the techniques used in Glow.

François-René Rideau, Legicash: Binding Blockchains Together through Smart Law, January 2018 (draft, never completed, never released), a document that is difficult to read, with plenty of technical ideas that explore the power and the limits of the analogy between legal contracts and smart contracts.

Previous relevant work by the authors of Glow and its predecessor

François-René Rideau, “Climbing Up the Semantic Tower — at Runtime”, Off the Beaten Track Workshop at POPL 2018.

Stephen Chang, Alex Knauth, and Ben Greenman, “Type Systems as Macros”, POPL 2017.

François-René Rideau, “From Software Creationism to Software Evolutionism”, Salon des Refusés, 2017.

Robert Goldman, Elias Pipping, and François-René Rideau, “Delivering Common Lisp Applications with ASDF 3.3”, European Lisp Symposium, 2017.

James Y. Knight, François-René Rideau, and Andrzej Walczak, “Building Common Lisp programs using Bazel”, European Lisp Symposium, 2016.

François-René Rideau, “Who Controls Your Computer? (And How to make sure it’s you)”, AltExpo 2015 at PorcFest XII.

François-René Rideau, “ASDF 3, or Why Lisp is Now an Acceptable Scripting Language”, European Lisp Symposium, 2014.

François-René Rideau, “LIL: CLOS reaches higher-order, sheds identity, and has a transformative experience”, International Lisp Conference, 2012.

Robert Goldman, and François-René Rideau, “Evolving ASDF: More Cooperation, Less Coordination”, International Lisp Conference, 2010.

François-René Rideau, “XCVB: an eXtensible Component Verifier and Builder for Common Lisp”, International Lisp Conference, 2009.

Jay McCarthy and Shriram Krishnamurthi, “Cryptographic Protocol Explication and End-Point Projection”, European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, 2008.

Jay McCarthy, Joshua Guttman, John Ramsdell, and Shriram Krishnamurthi, “Compiling Cryptographic Protocols for Deployment on the Web”, International World Wide Web Conference, 2007.

François-René Rideau, “Metaprogramming and Free Availability of Sources”, January 1999, originally presented in French at “Autour du Libre 1999”.