2,246 papers · page 71 of 113
The act of computer programming is generally considered to be temporally removed from a computer program's execution. In this paper we discuss the idea of programming as an activity that takes place within the temporal bounds of a real-time computational process and its interacti…
Encapsulated abstractions are fundamental in object-oriented programming. A single class may employ multiple abstractions to achieve its purpose. Such abstractions are often related and combined in disciplined ways. This paper explores ways to express, verify and rely on logical …
Someday computer scientists may build systems of astronomical complexity that provide profound benefit to humanity. However, the question today is how such feats will ultimately be achieved. As is common with technology, present limitations to modern approaches challenge our imag…
Many language implementations, particularly for high-level and scripting languages, are based on carefully honed runtime systems that have an internally sequential execution model. Adding support for parallelism in the usual form -- as threads that run arbitrary code in parallel …
Accurately predicting program behaviors (e.g., locality, dependency, method calling frequency) is fundamental for program optimizations and runtime adaptations. Despite decades of remarkable progress, prior studies have not systematically exploited program inputs, a deciding fact…
This paper presents TransFinder, a compile-time tool that automatically determines which statements of an unsynchronized multithreaded program must be enclosed in atomic regions to enforce conflict-serializability. Unlike previous tools, TransFinder requires no programmer input (…
To support development tools like debuggers, runtime systems need to provide a meta-programming interface to alter their semantics and access internal data. Reflective capabilities are typically fixed by the Virtual Machine (VM). Unanticipated reflective features must either be s…
As software becomes increasingly complex and difficult to analyze, it is more and more common for developers to use high-level, type-safe, object-oriented (OO) programming languages and to architect systems that comprise multiple components. Different components are often impleme…
In this paper we propose a communication-centric approach to specifying and checking how multithreaded programs use shared memory to perform inter-thread communication. Our approach complements past efforts for improving the safety of multithreaded programs such as race detection…
The Java language lacks the important notions of ownership (an object owns its representation to prevent unwanted aliasing) and immutability (the division into mutable, immutable, and readonly data and references). Programmers are prone to design errors, such as representation ex…
An object diagram makes explicit the object structures that are only implicit in a class diagram. An object diagram may be missing and must extracted from the code. Alternatively, an existing diagram may be inconsistent with the code, and must be analyzed for conformance with the…
In this paper we explore the idea that the code that constitutes a program actually forms a higher-level, program specific language. The symbols of the language are the abstractions of the program, and the grammar of the language is the set of (generally unwritten) rules about th…
The shift from single to multiple core architectures means that programmers must write concurrent, multithreaded programs in order to increase application performance. Unfortunately, multithreaded applications are susceptible to numerous errors, including deadlocks, race conditio…
Scripting languages enjoy great popularity due to their support for rapid and exploratory development. They typically have lightweight syntax, weak data privacy, dynamic typing, powerful aggregate data types, and allow execution of the completed parts of incomplete programs. The …
Today's shared-memory parallel programming models are complex and error-prone.While many parallel programs are intended to be deterministic, unanticipated thread interleavings can lead to subtle bugs and nondeterministic semantics. In this paper, we demonstrate that a practical t…
We present the DOOP framework for points-to analysis of Java programs. DOOP builds on the idea of specifying pointer analysis algorithms declaratively, using Datalog: a logic-based language for defining (recursive) relations. We carry the declarative approach further than past wo…
Full-featured integrated development environments have become critical to the adoption of new programming languages. Key to the success of these IDEs is the provision of services tailored to the languages. However, modern IDEs are large and complex, and the cost of constructing o…
In 1985 Luca Cardelli and Peter Wegner, my advisor, published an ACM Computing Surveys paper called "On understanding types, data abstraction, and polymorphism". Their work kicked off a flood of research on semantics and type theory for object-oriented programming, which continue…
Modern object-oriented languages have complex features that cause programmers to overspecify their programs. This overspecification hinders automatic optimizers, since they must preserve the overspecified semantics. If an optimizer knew which semantics the programmer intended, it…
Object-oriented languages involve a threefold tradeoff between runtime efficiency, expressiveness (multiple inheritance), and modularity, i.e. open-world assumption (OWA). Runtime efficiency is conditioned by both the implementation technique and compilation scheme. The former sp…