2,246 papers · page 57 of 113
We report on an industrial case study on developing the embedded software for a smart meter using the C programming language and domain-specific extensions of C such as components, physical units, state machines, registers and interrupts. We find that the extensions help signific…
R is a popular dynamic language designed for statistical computing. Despite R's huge user base, the inefficiency in R's language implementation becomes a major pain-point in everyday use as well as an obstacle to apply R to solve large scale analytics problems. The two most commo…
Modern accelerator programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, organise threads into work-groups. Remote-scope promotion (RSP) is a language extension recently proposed by AMD researchers that is designed to enable applications, for the first time, both to optimise for the common cas…
Traversing complex Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) typically requires large amounts of tedious boilerplate code. For many operations most of the code simply walks the structure, and only a small portion of the code implements the functionality that motivated the traversal in the fir…
Many profilers based on bytecode instrumentation yield wrong results in the presence of an optimizing dynamic compiler, either due to not being aware of optimizations such as stack allocation and method inlining, or due to the inserted code disrupting such optimizations. To avoid…
The HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is a JIT compiler and runtime for PHP. While PHP values are dynamically typed, real programs often have latent types that are useful for optimization once discovered. Some types can be proven through static analysis, but limitations in the ahead-…
Gradual typing combines static and dynamic typing flexibly and safely in a single programming language. To do so, gradually typed languages implicitly insert casts where needed, to ensure at runtime that typing assumptions are not violated by untyped code. However, the implicit n…
Wildcard annotations can improve the generality of Java generic libraries, but require heavy manual effort. We present an algorithm for refactoring and inferring more general type instantiations of Java generics using wildcards. Compared to past approaches, our work is practical …
A scalable programming language is one in which the same concepts can describe small as well as large parts. Towards this goal, Scala unifies concepts from object and module systems. An essential ingredient of this unification is the concept of objects with type members, which ca…
Static analysis for JavaScript can potentially help programmers find errors early during development. Although much progress has been made on analysis techniques, a major obstacle is the prevalence of libraries, in particular jQuery, which apply programming patterns that have det…
Testing and static analysis can help root out bugs in programs, but not in data. This paper introduces data debugging, an approach that combines program analysis and statistical analysis to automatically find potential data errors. Since it is impossible to know a priori whether …
Developers who set a breakpoint a few statements too late or who are trying to diagnose a subtle bug from a single core dump often wish for a time-traveling debugger. The ability to rewind time to see the exact sequence of statements and program values leading to an error has gre…
We introduce RATE TYPES, a novel type system to reason about and optimize data-intensive programs. Built around stream languages, RATE TYPES performs static quantitative reasoning about stream rates -- the frequency of data items in a stream being consumed, processed, and produce…
Dynamic taint analysis is a well-known information flow analysis problem with many possible applications. Taint tracking allows for analysis of application data flow by assigning labels to data, and then propagating those labels through data flow. Taint tracking systems tradition…
We describe an algorithm to perform symbolic execution of a multithreaded program starting from an arbitrary program context. We argue that this can enable more efficient symbolic exploration of deep code paths in multithreaded programs by allowing the symbolic engine to jump dir…
There are many domain libraries, but despite the performance benefits of compilation, domain-specific languages are comparatively rare due to the high cost of implementing an optimizing compiler. We propose commensal compilation, a new strategy for compiling embedded domain-speci…
Mobile app markets have lowered the barrier to market entry for software producers. As a consequence, an increasing number of independent app developers offer their products, and recent platforms such as the MIT App Inventor and Microsoft's TouchDevelop enable even lay programmer…
Non-volatile main memory, such as memristors or phase change memory, can revolutionize the way programs persist data. In-memory objects can themselves be persistent without the need for a separate persistent data storage format. However, the challenge is to ensure that such data …
Today, Java is regularly used to implement large multi-threaded server-class applications that use locks to protect access to shared data. However, understanding the impact of locks on the performance of a system is complex, and thus the use of locks can impede the progress of th…
We consider the problem of provably verifying that an asynchronous message-passing system satisfies its local assertions. We present a novel reduction scheme for asynchronous event-driven programs that finds almost-synchronous invariants - invariants consisting of global states w…