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 Instrumentation

Aug 27, 2025: How to Slow Down a Program? And Why it Can Be Useful.

Most research on programming language performance asks a variation of a single question: how can we make some specific program faster? Sometimes we may even investigate how we can use less memory. This means a lot of research focuses solely on reducing the amount of resources needed to achieve some computational goal.
Sep 17, 2024: Instrumentation-based Profiling on JVMs is Broken!

Last year, we looked at how well sampling profilers work on top of the JVM. Unfortunately, they suffer from issues such as safepoint bias and may not correctly attribute observed run time to the correct methods because of the complexities introduced by inlining and other compiler optimizations.