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 STM

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 11, 2015 Why Is Concurrent Programming Hard? And What Can We Do about It? #vmm2015
Yesterday at the Virtual Machine Meetup, I was giving a talk about why I think concurrent programming is hard, and what we can do about it.
Jul 15, 2014 Why is Concurrent Programming hard? In short, I think, it is hard because on the one hand there is not a single concurrency abstraction that fits all problems, and on the other hand the various different abstractions are rarely designed to be used in combination with each other.
Feb 17, 2014 Towards Composable Concurrency Abstractions
One of the big questions that came up during my PhD was: ok, now you got your fancy ownership-based metaobject protocol, and you can implement actors, agents, communicating sequential processes, software transactional memory, and many others, but now what? How are you going to use all of these in concert in one application? Finding a satisfying answer is unfortunately far from trivial.
Nov 8, 2012 What If: Developing Applications in the Multicore Era
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.
Jun 7, 2010 Trends in Concurrency 2010, part 1
I already posted the presentation I gave at the summer school earlier. In the following posts, I will report a bit about the lectures of the summer school, similar to my posts about the TPLI summer school of last year.
Feb 7, 2010 Virtual Machine Support for Many-Core Architectures: Decoupling Abstract from Concrete Concurrency Models
Finally, my first workshop paper got published, which was a little odyssey with some misunderstandings, but anyway, now it is out. It is just a position paper, thus, do not expect to many insights. However, what it describes is my big plan, and hopefully the story of my PhD. Am working on it…