161 papers · page 2 of 9
Debugging applications that execute within a framework is not always easy: the call-stack offered to developers is often a mix-up of stack frames that belong to different frameworks, introducing an unnecessary noise that prevents developers from focusing on the debugging task. Mo…
Python is a popular, dynamic language for data science and scientific computing. To ensure efficiency, significant numerical libraries are implemented in static native languages. However, performance suffers when switching between native and non-native code, especially if data ha…
WebAssembly is designed to be an alternative to JavaScript that is a safe, portable, and efficient compilation target for a variety of languages. The performance of high-level languages depends not only on the underlying performance of WebAssembly, but also on the quality of the …
Python 3 is a highly dynamic language, but it has introduced a syntax for expressing types with PEP484. This paper explores how developers use these type annotations, the type system semantics provided by type checking and inference tools, and the performance of these tools. We e…
To keep applications highly responsive, garbage collectors (GCs) try to minimize interruptions of the application threads. While pauses due to non moving GCs can be drastically reduced through concurrent or incremental strategies, compaction pauses remain a big problem.
Debugging is one of the most important and time consuming activities in software maintenance, yet mainstream debuggers are not well-adapted to several debugging scenarios. This has led to the research of new techniques covering specific families of complex bugs. Notably, recent r…
The R programming language combines a number of features considered hard to analyze and implement efficiently: dynamic typing, reflection, lazy evaluation, vectorized primitive types, first-class closures, and extensive use of native code. Additionally, variable scopes are reifie…
Since LISP, dynamic languages have supported dynamically-checked type annotations. Even in dynamic languages, these annotations are typically static: tests are restricted to checking low-level features of objects and values, such as primitive types or membership of an explicit pr…
Python is a popular language for end-user software development in many application domains. End-users want to harness parallel compute resources effectively, by exploiting commodity manycore technology including GPUs. However, existing approaches to parallelism in Python are esot…
Today's hardware is increasingly parallel, and to increase performance, applications must be able to use this parallelism. Hence, programming languages must provide the means for parallel execution. The language Python offers a multithreading, shared-memory model for concurrency.…
There are many factors for the success of a new programming language implementation. Existing language implementation frameworks such as Truffle or RPython have focused on run-time performance and security, or on providing a comprehensive set of libraries.
Gradual typing enables programmers to combine static and dynamic typing in the same language. However, ensuring sound interaction between the static and dynamic parts can incur runtime cost. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the transient design for gradual typing in R…
We propose standard object out, an object-oriented analog to the output part of the Unix standard input output library.
The R programming language is very popular for developing statistical software and data analysis, thanks to rich libraries, concise and expressive syntax, and support for interactive programming. Yet, the semantics of R is fairly complex, contains many subtle corner cases, and is…
Operating systems are traditionally implemented in low- level, performance-oriented programming languages. These languages typically rely on minimal runtime support and provide unfettered access to the underlying hardware. Tra- dition has benefits: developers control the resource…
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) are operationally similar to a dynamic language processor. They take SQL queries as input, dynamically generate an optimized execution plan, and then execute it. In recent decades, the emergence of in-memory databases with columnar s…
Recent advances in execution environments for JavaScript and WebAssembly that run on a broad range of devices, from workstations and mobile phones to IoT devices, provide new opportunities for portable and web-based numerical computing. Indeed, numerous numerical libraries and ap…
Logging is a fundamental part of the software development and deployment lifecycle but logging support is often provided as an afterthought via limited library APIs or third-party modules. Given the critical nature of logging in modern cloud, mobile, and IoT development workflows…
We present a declarative, object-oriented language in which queries play a central role. Queries are used not only to access data, but also to refer to the application’s object members and as a means of program control. The language is fully declarative, with queries and other pu…
Static compilation, a.k.a., ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, is an alternative approach to JIT compilation that can combine good speed and lightweight memory footprint, and that can accommodate read-only memory constraints that are imposed by some devices and some operating syste…