Recently by Bryan Weber

JVM Language Summit 2009 - Day 3

By Bryan Weber on September 18, 2009 12:54 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Terrance Parr - ANTLR

Terrance is entertaining and energetic.  He showed some of the challenges ANTLR faces and had some requests from the JVM that are slightly different from most of the language implementors.

Stadler - JVM Continuations

Another research talk.  The definition of continuations caused a side discussion, but I really enjoyed this talk.  It is only implemented in the c1 client compiler.  Security (serialization) and finally blocks are some of the unanswered questions here.

Wimmer - trace-based JIT

More research (UC-Irvine, but really more from Linz).  Discussed TCO, client compiler visualization tool and trace based JIT.  Uses traces and not just heuristics to identify hotspots for compilation.  Works with blocks as well as methods.  Think tracemonkey for Hotspot.

Gafter - Static dynamic types

Neal spoke about the new dynamic keyword in C# and the DLR.  Described the DLR as basically a MOP.  I would love to see a clean language implementation on the JVM with this sort of type system.

Siek - Blame tracking

Blame tracking is tracking type problems in dynamic languages and blaming the proper point in the code that made the initial improper call.  It also works for mixed static/dynamic type systems.  Currently it only identifies the outmost problem for space efficiency reasons.

Field - JavaFX binding

Bindings are handled by the creation of locations which can be pretty inefficient.  This talk went through the various rounds of attempting to make bindings fast(er).

Baker - Jython

History of Jython.  Optimizations.  Mostly discussed the libraries and future direction.

Remi Forax - 292 (invoke dynamic aka indy) backport

Backport works via proxies and code weaving since the byte code instruction is not available.  Two transformations occur via Java agents and the performance is very respectable.  It works with JDK 5 and 6.

The final session (not recorded) was by Slava on the Factor programming language compiler. Factor is a stack based language like Forth that does NOT run on the JVM.  This session was awesome.  While there weren't any new compiler optimizations that I hadn't heard of previously, it is very impressive was Slava has done with Factor.  If you haven't ever checked it out, the url is http://factorcode.org/  Again, kudos to Sun for inviting non-JVM participants, it really adds to the quality of the event imho.

PS Linux doesn't work well for presentations. :)
PPS People want TCO
PPPS 64k byte limit in methods is a problem
PPPPS The amount of cooperation among projects seems to have increased significantly since last year
PPPPPS Startup time needs to be improved

JVM Language Summit 2009 - Day 2

By Bryan Weber on September 18, 2009 11:57 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
While day 1 focused on invokedynamic day 2 focused on time and locality.  

Hickey keynote

Very thought provoking.  Argued for immutable data structures and pure functions, but with time transitions and observers.  Nice pragmatic response in a way to Erik Meijer's Fundamentalist Functional Programming from last year's JVM language Summit.  This was somewhat a philosophical presentation, but much like last year it made me want to re-visit Clojure.  Here is a better summary than I could have written: http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Clojure_Keynote

Cliff Click

Awesome scheduling to put this immediately after Rich's talk.  Cliff offered up four presentations and the audience overwhelmingly chose the one about x86.  Interestingly this had some similar theories to Rich's talk (time and locality), but at an extremely low level.

Hotswap

Research presentation from European students that have partnered with Sun.  This was interesting, but the limitations make it not that useful for real production code hotswapping in my opinion.

Groovy

This talk by Theodorou focused on the performance of Groovy and was almost an advertisement for not using Groovy.  Of course the performance of Groovy doesn't match Java, but it is really bad in some instances.  The moral was use Java where performance is necessary.

Sun update

This was probably not recorded, but Octavian took hard questions from Josh Bloch, Neal Gafter and others.  Hopefully the departure of key Sun employees ends up helping Sun in the long run.  In my opinion Sun is overestimating the value of the Java store.

Erik Meijer

Not nearly as entertaining as last year's talk, but still interesting and based on mathematics.  Erik was looking for solutions to concurrency and resource cleanup problems that are difficult and that currently have no "clean" solution.

JRocket

Frederik's talk focused mostly on anti-optimizations and basically asked the language designers to not try to implement optimizations that are also performed by the JVM.  The audience was hoping for specific patterns more than Frederik offered up, but Frederik is clearly very knowledgeable about JRocket and the JVM specification.

Ioke

Ola tried to give a one hour introduction to Ioke in 30 minutes and by his own admission it did not work out that well.  Many in the audience were not familiar with the syntax of IO which originally inspired Ioke and that did not help him very much.  The BNF was shown much more than actual source examples.

Dinner

Dinner was at Faultine which has good food and terrible acoustics.  Aside from having to scream at the people sitting near me it was a brilliant time.  Dick Wall of the Java Posse was very friendly and a fantastic ambassador for the Java/Scala community.  If you aren't familiar with the Java Posse podcast then I suggest you check it out on iTunes or at http://javaposse.com/. Their google group and mailing list are also interesting.



JVM Language Summit 2009 - Day 1

By Bryan Weber on September 16, 2009 12:05 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Day 1 of the 2nd annual JVM language summit at Sun Microsystems has come to a close.  Once again this conference has had excellent content in the presentations.  My overall impression of today was that many projects (JRuby, Atilla's MOP, etc) already have done significant work on integrating invoke dynamic. 

And once again Sun was smart enough to invite non-JVM participants.  Today was Allison Randal from Parrot.  Tomorrow will include Erik Meijer of Microsoft and Haskell fame. I would love to see him top his presentation from last year, it will be difficult.

Charlie Nutter (of Engine Yard, still not quite used to that) talked about JRuby, Duby and Surinx.  

Mark Reinhold talked about the JDK, Atilla spoke about his MOP framework, Miles Sabin spoke about Scala tooling, and David Pollack spoke about Scala basics.

The JVM presentations were interesting, but the best material was at dinner.  Sorry to non-attendees, that won't be on InfoQ later.

John Rose's breakout session was the highlight of Day 1 for me.  It is really fun to think about the parts of the implementation of Method Handles that do not have solutions yet or where certain features could be taken in the future. 

One of the breakout sessions was on Noop. http://code.google.com/p/noop/ This reminded me of the Fan programming language from last year's event.  Only Fan has a real implementation and noop is more or less in the vaporware phase at this point in time.  The two goals of noop are easy testing (even of legacy code) and readability.  As conceived today it is not going to achieve either to the degree the implementors would like IMHO.  It almost reminds me of turning Guice into a programming language...

Oh yeah, and if you didn't already know, Brian Goetz knows a lot about concurrency.  A whole lot.  He was able to detect a concurrency bug in sample code that fit on one slide after a few seconds of reading it.  

Tomorrow's schedule is jam packed with presentations that interest me.  Will post more tomorrow night!

Day 3 of the JVM Language Summit

By Bryan Weber on September 27, 2008 1:34 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By far the most entertaining and most thought provoking presentation of the JVM language summit was given by Erik Meijer (and by a large margin). Unfortunately, it was not recorded and will not be on InfoQ like many of the other presentations as far as I know. His talk was called Fundamentalist Functional Programming which is basically his way of advocating pure functional languages (read: Haskell although he did mention Clean as well). He argued that any impure functional language is NOT a functional language. Either you are pure or you happen to have some features of functional programming languages. And he did this in a wildly entertaining manner. I've personally been looking at Haskell recently so this talk was very timely and informative. How often do you see a presentation where someone suggests that Computer Science has gone in completely the wrong direction the past 50 years and needs to get back on track and has some ammo to back it up? I think many people in the audience found it entertaining, but not really practical. To that I would ask, why not? How many times a day do you say to yourself "there must be a better way?" Maybe this would be a quantum leap? I'm still exploring Haskell and I think that it might not be the solution, but it might inspire a better way. I've found many people on the Haskell IRC channel (which is extremely active) to be very helpful, but the documentation about Haskell will scare away most programmers. The concepts aren't hard, but if you read the wikibook you will likely come away with the impression that only PhDs in Mathematics can learn Haskell. Real World Hasekll seems better, but still lacks that killer intro that will grab the attention of the masses (and maybe they don't want the masses...). Erik's presentation was passionate and you could tell that he really believes that pure functional programming is the future.

Cliff Click's demo of Azul Systems tool was very, very impressive (and only about a dozen people saw it). His presentation was also good. This type of low level HotSpot support is necessary for language designers who are serious about performance and $40k seemed reasonable for a machine if you get Cliff's expertise along with it!

In addition to some C# by Mads, Allison Randal spoke about the Parrot VM. I was happy to see that Sun had the openness to invite Microsoft and Parrot to take part. I think that it really added to the quality of the summit. Google had some folks present, but didn't really talk about how they use the JVM. Next year, I would love to see some more activity from Google.

Parrot is a register based VM which makes some things (ie continuations) easier to implement, but I think that it might be quite some time before the performance can match the HotSpot JVM for most things. Parrot has been around for 7 years so they just have not had as much time (and money?) to devote to making it as mature as the JVM.

Thinking about going to the JVM language summit next year? I highly recommend the event, but it is a small group of highly experienced language designers. So the following words should not scare you: invariant, covariance, type erasure, continuations, tail call optimization, etc. You probably also should have some experience implementing your own language and/or working extensively at the byte code level. It will also help to be familiar with the symbols used to describe type systems. I don't mean to scare anyone away, but I recommend that you make an honest assessment if the event is right for you. Otherwise you might have a good time but not be able to take part in the conversations. If this is your thing, Microsoft also has a Lang.NET conference you might want to check out.

My only suggestion to Sun: use a room with a screen that is elevated a little more so the entire room can see the full screen.

Summary

  • LINQ - Functional programming features in C#.
  • Kawa - Scheme without full continuations.
  • Fundamentalist Functional Programming - Turn your world upside down presentation. Described in detail above.
  • NetRexx - An old IBM scripting language that has been open sourced.
  • Scalify - Library to take Java code as input and produce Scala as output. Looking for others to join to add Java -> "other JVM language" implementations as well.
  • Closures and the JVM - Mostly discussed language interoperability on the JVM and the problems languages face when trying to use libraries written in other languages (with Java being somewhat of an exception). If you haven't heard by now, Neal is also working for Microsoft.
  • Bytecodes for fast JVMs - Showed low level metrics for Clojure, JRuby and Jython. Cliff was able to identify areas where teams thought that something was being inlined, but in fact was not.
  • Jatha Common Lisp - What Ola Bini worked on before JRuby.
  • Parrot VM - Register based VM.

Many thanks to Sun for hosting a spectacular event. In particular, thank you John Rose for taking the time on several occasions to chat. I know you were very busy.

Day 2 of the JVM Language Summit

By Bryan Weber on September 26, 2008 12:35 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, how often do you get to speak to an employee of Sun, Google and Microsoft in the same day? And not just any employee, but some of their best and brightest? Needless to say, day 2 was loads of fun. And I got to ask Erik Meijer exactly how many tie-dye shirts does he own... I've always wondered that.

Overall impressions: many people here are "into" functional programming languages. Concurrency is another big topic. This conference has just the right blend of academia and "real world" for me. It is very technical, but not so full of Greek letters that your head hurts.

  • Gosling keynote - History of Java.
  • JavaFX - How they use javac to compile JavaFX.
  • JRuby - How they have blazed the trail for dynamic languages on the JVM.
  • ASM - The library for byte code manipulation.
  • PHP - Not totally sure why, but they are working on it. Overall, I think its good to have as many mainstream languages on the JVM as possible.
  • MOP - Metaobject protocol for passing objects between dynamic languages on the JVM. Like the idea, not sure sure about the implementation.
  • invokedynamic backport - I can't get enough details about invokedynamic.
  • Clojure - Functional language on the JVM. The highlight of the day for me. It's not 100% what I would like to see, but it is the closest yet.
  • Python gradual typing - Typing notation makes your head spin, but a very good talk.
  • Jython - Sort of opposite situation from the CLR/DLR. On the DLR IronPython came before IronRuby and Ruby.NET and really blazed the trail. On the JVM Jython has been around, but they seem to be in a complete re-write and are really leveraging a lot from JRuby (and that is very, very good).

Final observation: I'm very impressed with how approachable the 80 or so odd people here are, especially the Sun employees. Granted they are the hosts, but they have really taken their time to interact with the participants (as they should because I really don't think that they would want to alienate this crowd in particular!).

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