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                    Seminar Announcement

            School of Computer Science, CECS
             The Australian National University
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Date:  Thursday, 22 October 2009
Time:  4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Venue: Room R214, Ian Ross Building [31]


Speaker: Steve Blackburn, School of Computer Science

Title:   Abstraction Without Guilt

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. 

Biography:


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars09/dept20091022




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