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Research & Papers#

Jac's core ideas are peer-reviewed research, not just design taste. The project grew out of research at the University of Michigan and is developed in the open. This page collects the published foundations, what each one contributes, and how to cite the project.

Published foundations#

Object-Spatial Programming  ·  arXiv:2503.15812

The formal model behind node, edge, and walker: programs expressed as mobile computation traversing a persistent typed topology, with abilities dispatched by arrival. This is the paradigm the Object-Spatial Programming tutorial teaches by example and the OSP reference specifies; the paper gives it a precise semantics and situates it against actors, mobile agents, and vertex-centric graph processing.

MTP: A Meaning-Typed Language Abstraction for AI-Integrated Programming  ·  OOPSLA 2025  ·  arXiv:2405.08965

The research behind by llm() and sem: treat the semantic content that well-written code already carries (names, types, targeted annotations) as the specification of delegated behavior, and make the compiler and runtime -- not the programmer -- responsible for prompt construction and typed output enforcement. The paper's evaluation compares MTP against hand-engineered prompt pipelines and reports comparable or better accuracy with substantially less code, lower token cost, and robustness to degraded naming quality.

The Jaseci Programming Paradigm and Runtime Stack: Building Scale-Out Production Applications Easy and Fast  ·  IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 22(2), 2023

The production lineage. The Jaseci stack -- Jac's earlier generation -- served walkers as scale-out API endpoints in commercial products, and the experience reported here (small teams shipping multi-user, persistent, AI-heavy applications without a conventional backend stack) is what motivated building the current language and runtime the way they are built.

In preparation#

A book-length treatment of the language's design and theory -- the diagnosis of the fragmented stack, the formal definition of the continuity property, the object-spatial calculus, and the design space of languages that share these properties -- is in preparation, along with companion papers. The practitioner's distillation of that material lives in the docs at The Two Ideas.

Citing Jac#

GitHub's "Cite this repository" button on the repo (powered by CITATION.cff) gives a ready-made reference. For the specific ideas, cite the papers above: OSP for the paradigm, MTP for the AI integration, and the Jaseci letter for the runtime lineage.

Working with us#

The project welcomes research collaborations -- language design, type systems, distributed runtimes, and human-factors studies of the paradigm are all live areas (several open problems are sketched at the end of The Two Ideas). Reach out on Discord or open a discussion on GitHub.