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 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.