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 with the tag Debugging

Oct 17, 2021: Actors! And now?

An Implementer’s Perspective on High-level Concurrency Models, Debugging Tools, and the Future of Automatic Bug Mitigation
Jul 26, 2021: Interpreters, Compilation, and Concurrency Tooling in PLAS at Kent

Here at Kent, we have a large group of researchers working on Programming Languages and Systems (PLAS), and within this group, we have a small team focusing on research on interpreters, compilation, and tooling to make programming easier.
Feb 18, 2021: Open Postdoc Position on Language Implementation and Concurrency
Jul 12, 2019: What if we could see all concurrency bugs in the debugger?

Multiverse Debugging: Non-Deterministic Debugging for Non-Deterministic Programs
Aug 24, 2018: Efficient Deterministic Replay for Actors

Debugging concurrent systems is pretty hard, and we worked already for a while to make things a bit better. However, a big remaining problem is that bugs are not easily reproduced.
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.
Sep 6, 2017: Building High-level Debuggers for Concurrent Languages with Truffle: The Missing Bits

Note: This post is meant for people familiar with Truffle. For introductory material, please see for instance this list.
Jun 6, 2017: A 10 Year Journey, Stop 4: Concurrency and Tooling

This post, the fourth in the series, is about my current work on concurrency and tooling. As mentioned before, I believe that there is not a single concurrency model that is suitable for all problems we might want to solve. Actually, I think, this can be stated even stronger: Not a single concurrency model is appropriate for a majority of the problems we want to solve.