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 Self-optimizing Interpreters

Oct 19, 2015 Tracing vs. Partial Evaluation: Comparing Meta-Compilation Approaches for Self-Optimizing Interpreters
Back in 2013 when looking for a way to show that my ideas on how to support concurrency in VMs are practical, I started to look into meta-compilation techniques. Truffle and RPython are the two most promising systems to build fast language implementations without having to implement a compiler on my own. While these two approaches have many similarities, from a conceptual perspective, they take two different approaches that can be seen as the opposite ends of a spectrum. So, I thought, it might be worthwhile to investigate them a little closer.
Jan 31, 2015 FOSDEM 2015: Building High-Performance Language Implementations With Low Effort
Today, I gave a talk on implementing languages based on the ideas behind RPython and Truffle at FOSDEM on the main track. Please find abstract and slides below.
Sep 22, 2014 Are We There Yet? Simple Language-Implementation Techniques for the 21st Century
The first results of my experiments with self-optimizing interpreters was finally published in IEEE Software. It is a brief and very high-level comparison of the Truffle approach with a classic bytecode-based interpreter on top of RPython. If you aren’t familiar with either of these approaches, the article is hopefully a good starting point. The experiments described in it use SOM, a simple Smalltalk.