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 GraalVM

Feb 23, 2024: Why Are My Bytecode Interpreters Slow? Hunting Truffles with VTune

As part of our work on the AST vs. Bytecode Interpreters paper, I briefly looked at how the native code of ahead-of-time-compiled bytecode loops looks like, but except for finding much more code than what I expected, I didn’t look too closely at what was going on.
Nov 17, 2023: The Changing “Guarantees” Given by Python's Global Interpreter Lock

In this blog post, I will look into the implementation details of CPython’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and how they changed between Python 3.9 and the current development branch that will become Python 3.13.
Oct 16, 2023: Which Interpreters are Faster, AST or Bytecode?

This post is a brief overview of our new study of abstract-syntax-tree and bytecode interpreters on top of RPython and the GraalVM metacompilation systems, which we are presenting next week at OOPSLA.