Stefan Marr

Full Professor (Universitätsprofessor)

Stefan Marr I head the Institute for System Software at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. My work focuses on programming language implementation techniques, compilation, complex concurrent systems, and tooling.

I am personally interested in making interpreters faster, detecting and preventing concurrency bugs at run time, and use modern language runtime systems to provide programmers with better tooling.

For contact details, please see my staff page.

Archive of posts with the tag Teaching

Feb 2, 2026: Programming Language Implementation: In Theory, We Understand. In Practice, We Wish We Would.

It’s February! This means I have been at the JKU for four months. Four months with teaching Compiler Construction and System Software, lots of new responsibilities (most notably signing off on telephone bills and coffee orders…), many new colleagues, and new things to learn for me, not least because of the very motivated students and PhD students here. And when I say motivated, yes, I am very surprised. While the attendance of my 8:30am Compiler Construction lectures was declining throughout the term as expected, the students absolutely aced their exam. I suspect I will have to make it harder next year. Much harder… hmmm 🤔 Much of the good results can likely be attributed to the very extensive exercise sessions run by my colleagues throughout the semester.
Apr 9, 2019: Another Decade of SOM Language Implementation

SOM, the Simple Object Machine, is a little dynamic language designed for teaching object-oriented virtual machine design. It originates in Aarhus, Denmark, and according to Lars Bak, it was implemented in the course of two days by Kasper Lund. They used it back in 2001 for a course at the University of Aarhus.