Archive of posts in the category Miscellaneous

• Jul 12, 2019: What if we could see all concurrency bugs in the debugger?

  Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs

• Oct 15, 2017: Debugging Concurrency Is Hard, but We Can Do Something About It!

  When we have to debug applications that use concurrency, perhaps written in Java, all we get from the debugger is a list of threads, perhaps some information about held locks, and the ability to step through each thread separately.

• 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.

• Mar 10, 2013: Replacing plyr's ddply with data.table to improve an R script's performance

  Since quite a while, I am using R as a scripting language to generate graphs to the benchmarking results of various experiments. Since we have a new 64 core machine at the lab, I happen to run into performance issues with scripts that process the benchmark results, because the number of measurements increased significantly and the plyr library I use was designed with ease of use in mind, instead of performance. Concretely, I was experiencing script runtimes of up to 25min for a data set with roughly 50.000 measurements.

• Dec 26, 2008: New Blog, New Design

  Since I started my PhD studies at the Programming Technology Lab (PROG) at the VUB in Brussels a while ago, I had to update my pages a bit to reflect my new live as a scientist.

• Mar 1, 2007: Die Duet™-Idee

  In der heutigen Zeit sind Computer nicht mehr aus unserem Leben wegzudenken, ein Leben ohne sie vielleicht gar unmöglich. Besonders aber Unternehmen sind abhängig von einer funktionierenden IT-Landschaft und verwenden hochkomplexe Software um z.B. ihre Buchhaltung oder Einkäufe zu erledigen oder Produktionsanlagen zu steuern. Dafür gibt es dann ERP-, SCM-, CRM- oder auch PLM-Lösungen. Eines haben sie zum überwiegenden Teil alle gemeinsam, sie sind schlecht bedienbar. Viele der auf dem Markt angebotenen Systeme sind problemorientiert und implementieren komplexe Zusammenhänge, die von ihren Nutzern oft, wenn überhaupt nur zum Teil verstanden werden. Die Oberflächen sind nicht nutzerorientiert entworfen worden sondern bilden nur die komplexen Probleme in einer oft nur schwer zu erfassenden Art und Weise ab.

• Jan 8, 2007: Duet™, eine nette Idee?

  Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering