Archive of posts with the tag VMs

• Oct 23, 2015: JIT Data Structures, Fully Reflective VMs, and Meta-Circular Meta-Tracing

  The year leading up to SPLASH has been pretty busy. Beside my own talks on Tracing vs. Partial Evaluation and Optimizing Communicating Event-Loop Languages with Truffle, there are going to be three other presentations on work I was involved in.

• 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.

• Feb 1, 2014: How to get a JIT Compiler for Free: Implementing SOM Smalltalk with RPython and Truffle

  Today at FOSDEM, I gave a brief talk on implementing SOM, a little Smalltalk, with RPython and Truffle. RPython, probably best known for the PyPy implementation, uses meta-tracing JIT compilation to make simple interpreters fast. Truffle, a research project of Oracle Lab, is an approach for building self-optimizing interpreters and in combination with Graal, it gives a JIT compiler for AST-like interpreters. In the talk, I briefly sketch both of them, without going into many details.

• Jan 21, 2013: Supporting Concurrency Abstractions in High-level Language Virtual Machines

  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.

• Jan 9, 2013: Parallel Gesture Recognition with Soft Real-Time Guarantees

  It has been a while since SPLASH’12, but I got finally around to put up a copy of our paper at the AGERE’12 workshop. It is based on Thierry’s master thesis and presents his work on parallelizing a Rete engine for gesture recognition. Lode and I were his advisors and are happily working with him on what we promised in the future work section.

• Nov 14, 2012: Sly and the RoarVM: Exploring the Manycore Future of Programming

  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.

• Jan 24, 2012: Modularity and Conventions for Maintainable Concurrent Language Implementations: A Review of Our Experiences and Practices

  Modularity: AOSD’12 will be in Potsdam at the end of March, and I am looking forward especially to the MISS’12 workshop.

• Dec 28, 2011: CSOM/PL: A Virtual Machine Product Line

  Welcome to Academia. That is how I take this one…

• Nov 2, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 3

  The third day started with Brendan Eich’s keynote on JavaScript’s world domination plan. It was a very technical keynote, not very typical I suppose. And he was rushing through his slides with an enormous speed. Good that I have some JavaScript background. Aside all the small things he mentioned, interesting for me is that he seemed to be very interested to get Intel’s RiverTrail approach to data-parallelism into ECMAScript in one or another form. That is kind of contradicting the position I heard so far, that ECMAScript would be done with having WebWorkers as a model for concurrency and parallel programming.

• Oct 29, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 1

  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.

• Oct 26, 2011: DLS'11 and VMIL'11 @SPLASH2011

  The second conference day was unfortunately full of “conflicts of interest”… It was pretty hard to choose between all the talks on the schedule.

• Sep 18, 2011: Using R to Understand Benchmarking Results

  Why R?

• Nov 4, 2010: RoarVM: The Manycore SqueakVM

  We are happy to announce, now officially, RoarVM: the first single-image manycore virtual machine for Smalltalk.

• Nov 2, 2010: RVM Open Sourced, Soon to be known as RoarVM

  Just a brief heads up before the actual announcement of RoarVM.

• Oct 30, 2010: Workshops at SPLASH 2010

  As usual I will write about a few of my personal highlights of SPLASH and the co-located workshops. That is mostly from my spotty notes, and from memory, so I don’t guarantee 100% accuracy, especially with respect to what other people might have said.

• Feb 21, 2010: Towards an Actor-based Concurrent Machine Model

  Already quite a while ago, I was involved in writing a workshop paper about an actor model for virtual machines. Actually, the main idea was to find a concurrency model for a VM which supports multi-dimensional separation of concerns. However, AOP is not that interesting for me at the moment, so I am focussing on the concurrency, especially the actor-based VM model.

• 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…

• Aug 3, 2009: Theory and Practice of Language Implementation, part 2

  The second part of the summer school was a bit more applied and more in the direction of my own interests. Chandra Krintz talked about managed runtime environments. Yannis Smaragdakis introduced multi-threaded programming and transactional memory. Sumit Gulwani as the third lecturer taught us symbolic bounds computation.