Archives for posts with tag: Wolfram Schulte

Inside SPUR – A Trace-Based JIT Compiler for CIL

April 15, 10 //
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Computer Scientists and MSR Researchers Wolfram Schulte, Herman Venter, Nikolai Tillmann, and Manuel Fahndrich join Erik Meijer for an Expert to Expert deep dive into the theory and implementation strategies inside of SPUR, a research Tracing Just-In-Time (TJIT) compiler for Microsoft’s Common Intermediate Language CIL (the target language of C#, VB.NET, F#, and many other .NET languages).  

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. 

In order to validate that the performance gains of a TJIT for interpreted languages like JavaScript do not depend on specific idioms of the language, the SPUR team produces a performance evaluation of a JavaScript runtime that translates JavaScript to CIL and then runs on top of SPUR.

Read the SPUR research paper.

C9 Conversations: Yuri Gurevich On Logic, Imperative, Abstraction and Algorithms

February 9, 10 //
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Welcome to the latest installment of C9 Conversations. For this episode, we were very fortunate to get a chance to converse openly with one of the world’s preeminent mathematical logicians, the great Yuri Gurevich.

Dr. Gurevich is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is currently a principle research scientist in Wolfram Schulte’s RiSE team (Research in Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research).

Originally, Dr. Gurevich started his career as an algebraist. Later he became a logician. Then he moved to computer science, where his main projects have been Abstract State Machines, Average Case Computational Complexity, and Finite Model Theory. Dr. Gurevich has been honored as a Dr. Honoris Causa of the University of Limburg, Belgium (1998), as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1996), as well as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995).

Dr. Gurevich’s fundamental work on the theory of Abstract State Machines (ASMs) is of paramount importance for theoretical and applied computer science. The significance of the theoretical concepts developed by Gurevich is confirmed by the substantial impact they have on mathematical modeling of discrete dynamic systems.

*This is probably the only interview in C9’s history where a good case is made for imperative programming versus declarative and functional (this starts right off the bat at around 02:31).

Read Yuri’s Annotated Articles

Tune in. Meet Yuri Gurevich.