Archive of posts from 2014

• Nov 19, 2014: SOM Performance Numbers

  Today, I got a few more benchmarks running to get a better idea of where RTruffleSOM and TruffleSOM stand in terms of their absolute performance.

• Sep 22, 2014: Are We There Yet? Simple Language-Implementation Techniques for the 21st Century

  The first results of my experiments with self-optimizing interpreters was finally published in IEEE Software. It is a brief and very high-level comparison of the Truffle approach with a classic bytecode-based interpreter on top of RPython. If you aren’t familiar with either of these approaches, the article is hopefully a good starting point. The experiments described in it use SOM, a simple Smalltalk.

• Sep 17, 2014: Fork/Join Parallelism in the Wild: Documenting Patterns and Anti-Patterns in Java Programs using the Fork/Join Framework

  Parallel programming is frequently claimed to be hard and all kind of approaches have been proposed to solve the complexity issues. The Fork/Join programming style introduced with Cilk enables the parallel decomposition of problems in a recursive divide-and-conquer style, and on the surface looks very simple with its minimalistic approach of having a fork and a join language construct. But is it actually simple to use? To find out, Mattias started to dig through the Java open source projects on GitHub and tried to identify common patterns. Next week, he will present our findings at PPPJ’14.

• Jul 15, 2014: Why is Concurrent Programming hard?

  In short, I think, it is hard because on the one hand there is not a single concurrency abstraction that fits all problems, and on the other hand the various different abstractions are rarely designed to be used in combination with each other.

• Mar 3, 2014: Domains: Safe Sharing Among Actors

  The actor model is a pretty nice abstraction to reason about completely independent entities that interact purely by exchanging messages. However, for software development, some see the pure actor model as too fine-grained and too restrictive exposing many of the low-level issues such as data races again on a higher level again, and thereby forgoing some of its conceptual benefits.

• Feb 17, 2014: Towards Composable Concurrency Abstractions

  One of the big questions that came up during my PhD was: ok, now you got your fancy ownership-based metaobject protocol, and you can implement actors, agents, communicating sequential processes, software transactional memory, and many others, but now what? How are you going to use all of these in concert in one application? Finding a satisfying answer is unfortunately far from trivial.

• Feb 13, 2014: Parallel Gesture Recognition with Soft Real-Time Guarantees

  More than three years ago, Lode and I started thinking about parallel event processing for realtime systems. The main use case back then was gesture and motion detection based on cameras such as the Kinect. Thierry created the first fully functional prototype called PARTE, and in addition to his master thesis, we wrote a workshop paper about it. Now, we finally got also the revised and extended version of this paper accepted.

• Feb 10, 2014: OMOP Ported to Opal on top of Pharo 3

  To prepare some experiments with Pharo’s new compiler infrastructure and a simple AST interpreter, I ported my implementation of the Ownership-based Metaobject Protocol (OMOP) to the Pharo 3. Loading the OMOP into an image will give you an STM implementation, a basic actor system, communicating sequential processes, Clojure-like agents, and active objects. Eventually, the goal is to provide a more extensive set of such concurrent programming mechanisms on top of the OMOP, but for now these five should already give an impression of how the OMOP itself works.

• Feb 1, 2014: How to get a JIT Compiler for Free: Implementing SOM Smalltalk with RPython and Truffle

  Today at FOSDEM, I gave a brief talk on implementing SOM, a little Smalltalk, with RPython and Truffle. RPython, probably best known for the PyPy implementation, uses meta-tracing JIT compilation to make simple interpreters fast. Truffle, a research project of Oracle Lab, is an approach for building self-optimizing interpreters and in combination with Graal, it gives a JIT compiler for AST-like interpreters. In the talk, I briefly sketch both of them, without going into many details.

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