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 PLDI

Apr 28, 2015 Zero-Overhead Metaprogramming
Runtime metaprogramming and reflection are slow. That’s a common wisdom. Unfortunately. Using refection for instance with Java’s reflection API, its dynamic proxies, Ruby’s #send or #method_missing, PHP’s magic methods such as __call, Python’s __getattr__, C#’s DynamicObjects, or really any metaprogramming abstraction in modern languages unfortunately comes at a price. The fewest language implementations optimize these operations. For instance, on Java’s HotSpot VM, reflective method invocation and dynamic proxies have an overhead of 6-7x compared to direct operations.