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 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.