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 Reflection

Feb 4, 2016: Open PostDoc Position on Programming Technology for Complex Concurrent Systems

We, or more specifically our colleagues from the Software Languages Lab in Brussels are looking for a post-doctoral researcher to work on a collaborative research project with us.
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.
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.