Archive of posts with the tag SOMns

• Oct 10, 2022: The Cost of Safety in Java

  Overhead of Null Checks, Array Bounds, and Class Cast Exceptions in GraalVM Native Image

• Jan 2, 2021: Towards a Synthetic Benchmark to Assess VM Startup, Warmup, and Cold-Code Performance

  One of the hard problems in language implementation research is benchmarking. Some people argue, we should benchmark only applications that actually matter to people. Though, this has various issues. Often, such applications are embedded in larger systems, and it’s hard to isolate the relevant parts. In many cases, these applications can also not be made available to other researchers. And, of course, things change over time, which means maintaining projects like DaCapo, Renaissance, or Jet Stream is a huge effort.

• Dec 15, 2020: The Shape of 1.7M Lines of Code

  Recently, I was wondering how large code bases look like when it comes to the basic properties compiler might care about. And here I am not thinking about dynamic properties, but simply static properties such as length of methods, number of methods per class, number of fields, and so on.

• Jul 7, 2020: Is This Noise, or Does This Mean Something? #benchmarking

  Do my performance measurements allow me to conclude anything at all?

• Jul 11, 2019: SOMns 0.7.0 Release with Extension Modules and Artifacts

  It has been a while since we put together a release for SOMns. And it has been even longer, since I last wrote about it on this blog.

• Oct 15, 2017: Debugging Concurrency Is Hard, but We Can Do Something About It!

  When we have to debug applications that use concurrency, perhaps written in Java, all we get from the debugger is a list of threads, perhaps some information about held locks, and the ability to step through each thread separately.

• Sep 6, 2017: Building High-level Debuggers for Concurrent Languages with Truffle: The Missing Bits

  Note: This post is meant for people familiar with Truffle. For introductory material, please see for instance this list.

• Jul 5, 2017: A 10 Year Journey, Stop 5: Growing the SOM Family

• Jun 6, 2017: A 10 Year Journey, Stop 4: Concurrency and Tooling

  This post, the fourth in the series, is about my current work on concurrency and tooling. As mentioned before, I believe that there is not a single concurrency model that is suitable for all problems we might want to solve. Actually, I think, this can be stated even stronger: Not a single concurrency model is appropriate for a majority of the problems we want to solve.

• Mar 7, 2017: SOMns 0.2 Release with CSP, STM, Threads, and Fork/Join

  Since SOMns is a pure research project, we aren’t usually doing releases for SOMns yet. However, we added many different concurrency abstractions since December and have plans for bigger changes. So, it seems like a good time to wrap up another step, and get it into a somewhat stable shape.

• Jan 10, 2017: Communicating Sequential Processes for Newspeak/SOMns

  One possible way for modeling concurrent systems is Tony Hoare’s classic approach of having isolated processes communicate via channels, which is called Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). Today, we see the approach used for instance in Go and Clojure.

• Oct 25, 2016: Cross-Language Compiler Benchmarking: Are We Fast Yet?

  Research on programming languages is often more fun when we can use our own languages. However, for research on performance optimizations that can be a trap. In the end, we need to argue that what we did is comparable to state-of-the-art language implementations. Ideally, we are able to show that our own little language is not just a research toy, but that it is, at least performance-wise, competitive with for instance Java or JavaScript VMs.

• Oct 22, 2016: Language Research with Truffle at the SPLASH'16 Conference

  Next weekend starts one of the major conferences of the programming languages research community. The conference hosts many events including our Meta’16 workshop on Metaprogramming, SPLASH-I with research and industry talks, the Dynamic Languages Symposium, and the OOPSLA research track.

• Aug 10, 2016: Can we get the IDE for free, too?

  With the Truffle language implementation framework, we got a powerful foundation for implementing languages as simple interpreters. In combination with the Graal compiler, Truffle interpreters execute their programs as very efficient native code. Now that we got just-in-time compilation essentially “for free”, can we get IDE integration for our Truffle languages as well?

• Apr 8, 2016: Adding Debugging Support to a Truffle Language

  Beside the great performance after just-in-time compilation, the Truffle Language implementation framework provides a few other highly interesting features to language implementers. One of them is the instrumentation framework, which includes a REPL, profiler, and debugger.

• Jan 25, 2016: Towards Meta-Level Engineering and Tooling for Complex Concurrent Systems

  Last December, we got a research project proposal accepted for a collaboration between the Software Languages Lab in Brussels and the Institute for System Software here in Linz. Together, we will be working on tooling for complex concurrent systems. And with that I mean systems that use multiple concurrency models in combination to solve different problems, each with the appropriate abstraction. I have been working on these issues already for a while. Some pointers are available here in an earlier post: Why Is Concurrent Programming Hard? And What Can We Do about It?

• Jan 12, 2016: Type Hierarchies and Guards in Truffle Languages

  Continuing a little bit with writing notes on Truffle and Graal, this one is based on my observations in SOMns and changes to its message dispatch mechanism. Specifically, I refactored the main message dispatch chain in SOMns. As in Self and Newspeak, all interactions with objects are message sends. Thus, field access and method invocation is essentially the same. This means that message sending is a key to good performance.