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 combining concurrency models in a safe manner and to enable developers to make sense of complex concurrent programs with appropriate tools.

Archive of posts with the tag Optimization

Apr 17, 2018 A Typical Truffle Specialization Pitfall
Writing specializations is generally pretty straight forward, but there is at least one common pitfall. When designing specializations, we need to remind ourselves that type-based specializations are technically guards.
Oct 22, 2016 Language Research with Truffle at the SPLASH'16 Conference
Next weekend starts one of the major conferences of the programming languages research community. The conference hosts many events including our Meta’16 workshop on Metaprogramming, SPLASH-I with research and industry talks, the Dynamic Languages Symposium, and the OOPSLA research track.
Jan 12, 2016 Type Hierarchies and Guards in Truffle Languages
Continuing a little bit with writing notes on Truffle and Graal, this one is based on my observations in SOMns and changes to its message dispatch mechanism. Specifically, I refactored the main message dispatch chain in SOMns. As in Self and Newspeak, all interactions with objects are message sends. Thus, field access and method invocation is essentially the same. This means that message sending is a key to good performance.
Oct 23, 2015 JIT Data Structures, Fully Reflective VMs, and Meta-Circular Meta-Tracing
The year leading up to SPLASH has been pretty busy. Beside my own talks on Tracing vs. Partial Evaluation and Optimizing Communicating Event-Loop Languages with Truffle, there are going to be three other presentations on work I was involved in.