Performance is dead, long live performance!

Abstract

In a world of social networking, security attacks, and hot mobile phones, the importance of application performance appears to have dimin-ished. My own research agenda has shifted from looking at the performance of memory allocation to building runtime systems that are more resilient to data corruption and security attacks. In my talk, I will outline a number of areas where code-generation and runtime tech-niques can be successfully applied to areas for purposes other than performance, such as fault tolerance, reliability, and security. Along the way, I will consider such questions as "Does it really matter if this corruption was caused by a software or hardware error?" and "Is it okay to let a malicious person allocate arbitrary data on my heap?".