Proceedings of the 8th symposium on Dynamic languages

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Tucson and the 2012 Dynamic Languages Symposium! This year's symposium -- the 8th in the series -- continues the tradition of communicating research results in the design, implementation, and application of dynamic languages. We are happy to report that the overall quality of this year's submissions was particularly high. Out of a total of 23 submissions, the program committee accepted 10 papers whose topics range from modularity to pattern matching, language semantics, and optimization. The program also includes an invited talk by David Smith on the Virtual World Framework, a new architecture for creating and distributing collaborative virtual spaces that's built on top of JavaScript and other Web technologies. Beyond the formal program, we hope this year's DLS will, like its predecessors, be a valuable forum for sharing ideas with other dynamic language researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world. Thank you for being part of this exciting community, and once again, welcome!