Yesterday was the first day of Smalltalks 2012 in Puerto Madryn. The organizers invited my to give a keynote on a topic of my choice, which I gladly did. Having just handed in my thesis draft, I chose to put my research into the context of Smalltalk and try to relate it to one of the main open questions: How do we actually want to program multicore systems.

The talk went ok, I think. Compared to academic conference, I was surprised by the amount of questions people asked. The discussions for me were also much more interesting than on a typical conference. Overall a good experience.

Abstract

What if you would need to use all the processor cores you got to get your application to run with acceptable performance? This talk explores how we can support the various abstractions for concurrent and parallel programming that would help us to master the challenges of the multicore era. We show a variant of the RoarVM and with a novel metaobject protocol that allows us to implement agents, actors, software transactional memory, and others easily while preserving performance.

Slides

Recording