Michael Homer

Michael builds inspectable language tools and publishes research that makes software-quality ideas concrete. GraceKit uses FEAST to share a parser across language implementations, reducing duplicated infrastructure for language developers, while Grace supports programming education. The JDala collaboration adds examples of runtime checks for avoiding concurrency errors in Java, giving researchers and engineers a practical approach to examine.

Michael Homer is a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, building programming-language implementations and tools for experimenting with safer, more maintainable software. Much of this research focuses on the educational language Grace, spanning Minigrace—a compiler translating Grace into C or JavaScript—and Kernan, an interpreter designed to follow the language specification and handle both valid and invalid code correctly.

In 2025, Michael co-authored FEAST, a technique for embedding structured representations of code in multiple programming languages. GraceKit uses the approach to share a single parser across implementations in Java, JavaScript, Haskell and Swift, accompanied by public source code and an online demonstration that support portable, maintainable language tooling.

Alongside FEAST, the 2025 JDala collaboration explores adding capability checks to Java to govern how running tasks access data. Demonstrating practical examples of avoiding concurrency bugs, Michael connects language design directly with questions of software correctness and long-term maintainability.