Last week, I started a series of posts to go over some of the projects I was involved in during my first 10 years working on language implementations. Today’s post focuses on my time as PhD student.
Last Friday, I defended my PhD dissertation. Finally, after 4 years and a bit, I am done. Finally. I am very grateful to all the people supporting me along the way and of course to my colleagues for their help.
My second talk at Smalltalks 2012 was most likely the reason why the organizers invited me in the first place. It was a slightly extended version of the Sly and RoarVM talk for the FOSDEM Smalltalk Dev Room from the beginning of the year, reporting on the Renaissance Project.
Yesterday was the first day of Smalltalks 2012 in Puerto Madryn. The organizers invited my to give a keynote on a topic of my choice, which I gladly did. Having just handed in my thesis draft, I chose to put my research into the context of Smalltalk and try to relate it to one of the main open questions: How do we actually want to program multicore systems.
Today, FOSDEM featured that first incarnation of a Smalltalk developer room. Unfortunately, FOSDEM is always packed with interesting talks, so, I only managed to attend a couple of talks. Most notably the talk on Spoon.
The first day of the technical tracks including OOPSLA started with a keynote by Ivan Sutherland titled The Sequential Prison. His main point was that the way we think and the way we build machines and software is based on sequential concepts. The words we use to communicate and express ourselves are often of a very sequential nature. His examples included: call, do, repeat, program, and instruction. Other examples that shape and restrict our way of thinking are for instance basic data structures and concepts like strings (character sequences). However, we also use words that enable thinking about concurrency and parallelism much better. His examples for these included: configure, pipeline, connect, channel, network, and path.
The following introduction and analysis of the Sly3 programming language was written by Pablo Inostroza Valdera as part of his course work for the Multicore Programming course of Tom Van Cutsem. The assignment was to write a blog post about a topic of their own choice, and I repost Pablo’s work here with his permission to spread the word about Sly a bit wider. We made his article also available as part of his work for the Renaissance project itself.
We are happy to announce, now officially, RoarVM: the first single-image manycore virtual machine for Smalltalk.
Just a brief heads up before the actual announcement of RoarVM.