[Pl-seminar] PL seminar schedule

[Aaron Turon]

NEU Programming Languages Seminar presents

Wolfram Schulte
Microsoft Research

Monday, April 12, 2010

*LIKELY* time and location:
10:30am - 12:00
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)
(Email confirming details to follow)


SPUR: A Trace-Based Just-in-Time Compiler for Microsoft's Common
Intermediate Language

ABSTRACT:

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 beneficial for dynamic languages such as JavaScript, where
the TJIT interfaces with the interpreter and produces machine code
from the JavaScript trace.

This direct coupling with a JavaScript interpreter makes it difficult
to harness the power of a TJIT for other components that are not
written in JavaScript, e.g., the DOM mplementation or the layout
engine inside a browser. Furthermore, if a TJIT is tied to a
particular high-level language interpreter, it is difficult to reuse
it for other input languages as the optimizations are likely targeted
at specific idioms of the source language.

To address these issues, we designed and implemented a TJIT for
Microsoft’s Common Intermediate Language CIL (the target language of
C#, VisualBasic, F#, and many other languages). Working on CIL enables
TJIT optimizations for any program compiled to this platform. In
addition, to validate that the performance gains of a TJIT for
JavaScript do not depend on specific idioms of JavaScript that are
lost in the translation to CIL, we provide a performance evaluation of
our JavaScript runtime which translates JavaScript to CIL and then
runs on top of our CIL TJIT.

Joint work with Michael Bebenita, Florian Brandner, Manuel Fahndrich,
Francesco Logozzo, Wolfram Schulte, Nikolai Tillmann, and Herman
Venter.

BIO:

As manager of Microsoft's Research in Software Engineering team
(RiSE), Dr. Wolfram Schulte coordinates Microsoft's research in
software engineering and programming languages in Redmond, USA. RiSE’s
mission is to advance software engineering by a better understanding
of the software development process, by better languages and tools for
describing, analyzing, testing and executing software, and by
providing proper foundations.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, Dr. Schulte spent five years as a
faculty member at the University of Ulm, one year as a software
development engineer at sd&m, and before that five years as a research
and teaching assistant at the Technical University of Berlin. He
received his habilitation from the University of Ulm and his PhD from
the Technical University of Berlin.