Stefan Marr

Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer)
and Royal Society Industry Fellow

Stefan Marr I am working at the School of Computing at the University of Kent. My work focuses on programming language implementation techniques, complex concurrent systems, and tooling.

Much of work revolves around making interpreters faster, detecting and preventing concurrency bugs at run time, and use modern language runtime systems to provide programmers with better tooling.

For contact details see my page at the School of Computing.

Archive of posts from February 2014

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.