7,482 papers · page 198 of 375
In this paper, we identify trends about, benefits from, and barriers to performing user evaluations in software engineering research. From a corpus of over 3,000 papers spanning ten years, we report on various subtypes of user evaluations (e.g., coding tasks vs. questionnaires) a…
With core counts on the rise, the sequential components of applications are becoming the major bottleneck in performance scaling as predicted by Amdahl's law. We are therefore faced with the simultaneous problems of occupying an increasing number of cores and speeding up sequenti…
Modern computing has adopted the floating point type as a default way to describe computations with real numbers. Thanks to dedicated hardware support, such computations are efficient on modern architectures, even in double precision. However, rigorous reasoning about the resulti…
In the current work, we investigate the benefits of immutability guarantees for allowing more flexible handling of aliasing, as well as more precise and concise specifications. Our approach supports finer levels of control that can mark data structures as being immutable through …
Mechanized proof assistants are powerful verification tools, but proof development can be difficult and time-consuming. When verifying a family of related programs, the effort can be reduced by proof reuse. In this paper, we show how to engineer product lines with theorems and pr…
Dataflow languages provide natural support for specifying constraints between objects in dynamic applications, where programs need to react efficiently to changes of their environment. Researchers have long investigated how to take advantage of dataflow constraints by embedding t…
MATLAB is a popular dynamic programming language used for scientific and numerical programming. As a language, it has evolved from a small scripting language intended as an interactive interface to numerical libraries, to a very popular language supporting many language features …
Existing approaches to extend a programming language with syntactic sugar often leave a bitter taste, because they cannot be used with the same ease as the main extension mechanism of the programming language - libraries. Sugar libraries are a novel approach for syntactically ext…
Refactoring is a popular technique for improving the structure of existing programs while maintaining their behavior. For statically typed programming languages such as Java, a wide variety of refactorings have been described, and tool support for performing refactorings and ensu…
We present a technique for automatically adding fine-grain locking to an abstract data type that is implemented using a dynamic forest -i.e., the data structures may be mutated, even to the point of violating forestness temporarily during the execution of a method of the ADT. Our…
Self-adjusting computation offers a language-based approach to writing programs that automatically respond to dynamically changing data. Recent work made significant progress in developing sound semantics and associated implementations of self-adjusting computation for high-level…
This paper introduces AC, a set of language constructs for composable asynchronous IO in native languages such as C/C++. Unlike traditional synchronous IO interfaces, AC lets a thread issue multiple IO requests so that they can be serviced concurrently, and so that long-latency o…
A new generation of mobile touch devices, such as the iPhone, iPad and Android devices, are equipped with powerful, modern browsers. However, regular websites are not optimized for the specific features and constraints of these devices, such as limited screen estate, unreliable I…
The need for programs to execute subcomponents in isolation from each other or with lower privileges is prevalent among today's systems. We introduce ribbons: a shared memory programming model that allows for more implicit sharing of memory than processes but is more restrictive …
A practical type system for ML-style recursive modules should address at least two technical challenges. First, it needs to solve the double vision problem, which refers to an inconsistency between external and internal views of recursive modules. Second, it needs to overcome the…
Gradual typing is a framework to combine static and dynamic typing in a single programming language. In this paper, we develop a gradual type system for class-based object-oriented languages with generics. We introduce a special type to denote dynamically typed parts of a program…
Software engineers now face the difficult task of refactoring serial programs for parallel execution on multicore processors. Currently, they are offered little guidance as to how much benefit may come from this task, or how close they are to the best possible parallelization. Th…
While there has been decades of work on developing automatic, locality-enhancing transformations for regular programs that operate over dense matrices and arrays, there has been little investigation of such transformations for irregular programs, which operate over pointer-based …
As hardware failures are no longer rare in the era of cloud computing, cloud software systems must "prevail" against multiple, diverse failures that are likely to occur. Testing software against multiple failures poses the problem of combinatorial explosion of multiple failures. …
Profilers help developers to find and fix performance problems. But do they find performance bugs -- performance problems that real users actually notice? In this paper we argue that -- especially in the case of interactive applications -- traditional profilers find irrelevant pr…