|
|
|
|
|
|
Help | Seminars List | Add Seminar | Edit Seminars | Tips for organisers | RSS | ics Calendar | Search | Send comments about this website to seminar-master@cecs.anu.edu.au
Contact: Malcolm.Newey@anu.edu.au DCS SEMINAR SERIES
Abstraction Without GuiltSteve Blackburn (School of Computer Science, ANU)DATE: 2009-10-22 TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00 LOCATION: Ian Ross Seminar Room ABSTRACT: While on the one hand systems programmers strive for reliability, security, and maintainability, on the other hand they depend on performance and transparent access to low-level primitives. Abstraction is the key tool for enabling the former but it typically obstructs the latter. This talk addresses this conundrum from three distinct angles; as a producer, a consumer, and an evaluator of high level programming languages, and is based on ten years of experience in each of these roles. I will discuss my experience as a producer, engineering a low-overhead, highly-expressive Java dialect suitable for systems programming. I will discuss my experience as a consumer, using Java and object oriented programming principles to build a JVM and memory management subsystem. Key to both of these is the role as an evaluator, measuring and understanding the complex behavior of managed runtime systems. The phrase "abstraction without guilt", coined by Ken Kennedy, nicely captures our philosophy on systems building.
|