Archive of posts from 2011

• Dec 28, 2011: CSOM/PL: A Virtual Machine Product Line

  Welcome to Academia. That is how I take this one…

• Dec 24, 2011: Synchronization Views for Event-loop Actors

  With Joeri we have been working already for a while on a paper to extend the standard actor model with more parallelism. This work is not completed yet, and there are still some theoretical issues with the approach he designed. But we are working on it!

• Nov 10, 2011: First Release Candidate of PHP 5.4 Available for Testing, including Traits!

  The first release candidate of PHP 5.4 was just released. The announcement on the main page is still missing, but the links are the usual ones: http://www.php.net/archive/2011.php#id2011-11-10-1

• Nov 2, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 3

  The third day started with Brendan Eich’s keynote on JavaScript’s world domination plan. It was a very technical keynote, not very typical I suppose. And he was rushing through his slides with an enormous speed. Good that I have some JavaScript background. Aside all the small things he mentioned, interesting for me is that he seemed to be very interested to get Intel’s RiverTrail approach to data-parallelism into ECMAScript in one or another form. That is kind of contradicting the position I heard so far, that ECMAScript would be done with having WebWorkers as a model for concurrency and parallel programming.

• Oct 31, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 2

  The second day of the technical tracks started with a keynote by Markus Püschel. He is not the typical programming language researcher you meet at OOPSLA, but he does research in automatic optimization of programs. In his keynote, he showed a number of examples how to get the best performance for a given algorithm out of a particular processor architecture. Today’s compilers are still not up to the task, and will probably never be up to it. Given a naïve implementation, hand-optimized C code can have 10x speedup when dependencies are made explicit, and the compiler knows that no aliasing can happen. He was then discussing how that can be approached in an automated way, and was also thinking about what programming languages could do.

• Oct 29, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 1

  The first day of the technical tracks including OOPSLA started with a keynote by Ivan Sutherland titled The Sequential Prison. His main point was that the way we think and the way we build machines and software is based on sequential concepts. The words we use to communicate and express ourselves are often of a very sequential nature. His examples included: call, do, repeat, program, and instruction. Other examples that shape and restrict our way of thinking are for instance basic data structures and concepts like strings (character sequences). However, we also use words that enable thinking about concurrency and parallelism much better. His examples for these included: configure, pipeline, connect, channel, network, and path.

• Oct 26, 2011: DLS'11 and VMIL'11 @SPLASH2011

  The second conference day was unfortunately full of “conflicts of interest”… It was pretty hard to choose between all the talks on the schedule.

• Oct 24, 2011: Transitioning to Multicore @SPLASH2011

  And here we go again: SPLASH 2011 has started with its first day of workshops.

• Sep 27, 2011: Which Problems Does a Multi-Language Virtual Machine Need to Solve in the Multicore/Manycore Era?

  As preparation for SPLASH’11, here my paper for the VMIL workshop. It is a position paper discussing in which direction virtual machines should evolve in the future with regard to the challenges manycore architectures and concurrent programming bring.

• Sep 18, 2011: Using R to Understand Benchmarking Results

  Why R?

• Aug 24, 2011: Sly and the RoarVM: Exploring the Manycore Future of Programming

  Today, I gave a talk at the ExaScience Lab, Intel Labs Europe in Leuven at IMEC. I talked mainly about the idea of nondeterministic programming, the Sly programming language and some details on our Smalltalk manycore virtual machine that enables those experiments. Thus, tried to spread the word about our Renaissance project at bit further.

• Aug 19, 2011: The Sly3 Programming Language

  The following introduction and analysis of the Sly3 programming language was written by Pablo Inostroza Valdera as part of his course work for the Multicore Programming course of Tom Van Cutsem. The assignment was to write a blog post about a topic of their own choice, and I repost Pablo’s work here with his permission to spread the word about Sly a bit wider. We made his article also available as part of his work for the Renaissance project itself.

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