Stefan Marr, Researcher and Lecturer

Stefan Marr I am working at the School of Computing at the University of Kent. My work focuses on programming language implementation techniques and concurrent and parallel programming.

In my dissertation, I proposed an ownership-based metaobject protocol as a unifying substrate for concurrency support in multi-language VMs.

Currently, I am working on fast dynamic language implementations, on combining concurrency models in a safe manner, automatically preventing concurrency issues from manifesting, and to enable developers to make sense of complex concurrent programs with appropriate tools.

For contact details see my page at the School of Computing.

Archive of posts with the tag Metrics

Jan 2, 2021 Towards a Synthetic Benchmark to Assess VM Startup, Warmup, and Cold-Code Performance
One of the hard problems in language implementation research is benchmarking. Some people argue, we should benchmark only applications that actually matter to people. Though, this has various issues. Often, such applications are embedded in larger systems, and it’s hard to isolate the relevant parts. In many cases, these applications can also not be made available to other researchers. And, of course, things change over time, which means maintaining projects like DaCapo, Renaissance, or Jet Stream is a huge effort.
Dec 30, 2020 The Shape of 6M Lines of Ruby
Following up on my last blog post, I am going to look at how Ruby is used to get a bit of an impression of whether there are major differences between Ruby and Smalltalk in their usage.
Dec 14, 2020 The Shape of 1.7M Lines of Code
Recently, I was wondering how large code bases look like when it comes to the basic properties compiler might care about. And here I am not thinking about dynamic properties, but simply static properties such as length of methods, number of methods per class, number of fields, and so on.