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.
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.
The second conference day was unfortunately full of “conflicts of interest”… It was pretty hard to choose between all the talks on the schedule.