[Pl-seminar] PL seminar schedule

[Aaron Turon]

The details for tomorrow's talk have been confirmed: 10:30am - 12:00
in WVH366.  The rest of the announcement is repeated below.

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Aaron Turon <turon at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>