Stefan Marr

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 with the tag AST

Apr 17, 2018: A Typical Truffle Specialization Pitfall

Writing specializations is generally pretty straight forward, but there is at least one common pitfall. When designing specializations, we need to remind ourselves that type-based specializations are technically guards.
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?
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.