2,246 papers · page 68 of 113
Parallelization transformations are an important vehicle for improving the performance and scalability of a software system. Utilizing concurrency requires that the developer first identify a suitable parallelization scope: one that poses as a performance bottleneck, and at the s…
Coordination can destroy scalability in parallel programming. A comprehensive library of scalable synchronization primitives is therefore an essential tool for exploiting parallelism. Unfortunately, such primitives do not easily combine to yield solutions to more complex problems…
Programming idioms, design patterns and application libraries often introduce cumbersome and repetitive boilerplate code to a software system. Language extensions and external DSLs (domain specific languages) are sometimes introduced to reduce the need for boilerplate code, but t…
Concurrency bugs are often due to inadequate synchronization that fail to prevent specific (undesirable) thread interleavings. Such errors, often referred to as Heisenbugs, are difficult to detect, prevent, and repair. In this paper, we present a new technique to increase program…
When optimizing large-scale applications, striking the balance between steady-state performance, start-up time, and code size has always been a grand challenge. While recent advances in trace compilation have significantly improved the steady-state performance of trace JITs for l…
Dynamic updates to running programs improve development productivity and reduce downtime of long-running applications. This feature is however severely limited in current virtual machines for object-oriented languages. In particular, changes to classes often apply only to methods…
Memory safety defends against inadvertent and malicious misuse of memory that may compromise program correctness and security. A critical element of memory safety is zero initialization. The direct cost of zero initialization is surprisingly high: up to 12.7%, with average costs …
Software construction today often involves the use of large frameworks. The challenge in this type of programming is that object-oriented frameworks tend to grow exceedingly intricate; they spread functionality among numerous classes, and any use of the framework requires knowled…
Fred Brooks' retelling of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel offers many insights into what makes building software difficult. The difficulty, according to common interpretations, comes from the communication and organizational problems in software development. But the stor…
This paper presents an approach for performance analysis of modern enterprise-class server applications. In our experience, performance bottlenecks in these applications differ qualitatively from bottlenecks in smaller, stand-alone systems. Small applications and benchmarks often…
We propose a new way to raise the level of discourse in the programming process: permit ambiguity, but manage it by linking it to unambiguous examples. This allows programming environments to work with high-level descriptions that lack precise semantics, such as natural language …
The halt in clock frequency scaling has forced architects and language designers to look elsewhere for continued improvements in performance. We believe that extracting maximum performance will require compilation to highly heterogeneous architectures that include reconfigurable …
Tracing just-in-time compilers (TJITs) determine frequently executed traces (hot paths and loops) in running programs and focus their optimization effort by emitting optimized machine code specialized to these traces. Prior work has established this strategy to be especially bene…
Building applications that are responsive and can exploit parallel hardware while remaining simple to write, understand, test, and maintain, poses an important challenge for developers. In particular, it is often desirable to enable various tasks to read or modify shared data con…
Tribal Ownership unifies class nesting and object ownership. Tribal Ownership is based on Tribe, a language with nested classes and object families. In Tribal Ownership, a program's runtime object ownership structure is characterised by the lexical nesting structure of its classe…
As heterogeneous parallel systems become dominant, application developers are being forced to turn to an incompatiblemix of low level programming models (e.g. OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, OpenCL). However, these models do little to shield developers from the difficult problems of paralleli…
The modularity of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been a controversial issue. To investigate this issue compared with object-oriented programming (OOP), we propose a simple language providing AOP mechanisms, which are enhanced traditional OOP mechanisms. We also present its…
Programming language innovation has been hindered by the difficulty of making changes to existing languages. A key source of difficulty is the tyrannical nature of existing approaches to realizing languages -- adding a new language construct means that any tool, document or progr…
Many relational static analysis techniques for precise reasoning about heap contents perform an explicit case analysis of all possible heaps that can arise. We argue that such precise relational reasoning can be obtained in a more scalable and economical way by enforcing the memo…
Online software upgrades are often plagued by runtime behaviors that are poorly understood and difficult to ascertain. For example, the interactions among multiple versions of the software expose the system to race conditions that can introduce latent errors or data corruption. M…