Archive of posts from 2016

• Oct 25, 2016: Cross-Language Compiler Benchmarking: Are We Fast Yet?

  Research on programming languages is often more fun when we can use our own languages. However, for research on performance optimizations that can be a trap. In the end, we need to argue that what we did is comparable to state-of-the-art language implementations. Ideally, we are able to show that our own little language is not just a research toy, but that it is, at least performance-wise, competitive with for instance Java or JavaScript VMs.

• Oct 22, 2016: Language Research with Truffle at the SPLASH'16 Conference

  Next weekend starts one of the major conferences of the programming languages research community. The conference hosts many events including our Meta’16 workshop on Metaprogramming, SPLASH-I with research and industry talks, the Dynamic Languages Symposium, and the OOPSLA research track.

• Aug 10, 2016: Can we get the IDE for free, too?

  With the Truffle language implementation framework, we got a powerful foundation for implementing languages as simple interpreters. In combination with the Graal compiler, Truffle interpreters execute their programs as very efficient native code. Now that we got just-in-time compilation essentially “for free”, can we get IDE integration for our Truffle languages as well?

• Jun 25, 2016: Writing Papers with Completely Automated Data Processing

  One of the first things that I found problematic about paper writing was the manual processing and updating of numbers based on experiments. Ever since my master thesis, this felt like a unnecessary and error prone step.

• Apr 8, 2016: Adding Debugging Support to a Truffle Language

  Beside the great performance after just-in-time compilation, the Truffle Language implementation framework provides a few other highly interesting features to language implementers. One of them is the instrumentation framework, which includes a REPL, profiler, and debugger.

• Feb 11, 2016: Domains: Sharing State in the Communicating Event-Loop Actor Model

  It has been a while since we started working on how to extended the Actor model with mechanisms to safely share state. Our workshop paper on Tanks was published in 2013. And now finally, an extended version of this work was accepted for publication. Below you can find the abstract with a few more details on the paper, and of course a preprint of the paper itself.

• Feb 4, 2016: Open PostDoc Position on Programming Technology for Complex Concurrent Systems

  We, or more specifically our colleagues from the Software Languages Lab in Brussels are looking for a post-doctoral researcher to work on a collaborative research project with us.

• Jan 25, 2016: Towards Meta-Level Engineering and Tooling for Complex Concurrent Systems

  Last December, we got a research project proposal accepted for a collaboration between the Software Languages Lab in Brussels and the Institute for System Software here in Linz. Together, we will be working on tooling for complex concurrent systems. And with that I mean systems that use multiple concurrency models in combination to solve different problems, each with the appropriate abstraction. I have been working on these issues already for a while. Some pointers are available here in an earlier post: Why Is Concurrent Programming Hard? And What Can We Do about It?

• Jan 12, 2016: Type Hierarchies and Guards in Truffle Languages

  Continuing a little bit with writing notes on Truffle and Graal, this one is based on my observations in SOMns and changes to its message dispatch mechanism. Specifically, I refactored the main message dispatch chain in SOMns. As in Self and Newspeak, all interactions with objects are message sends. Thus, field access and method invocation is essentially the same. This means that message sending is a key to good performance.

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