The trend in modern programming languages is towards dynamism, performance, and safety.  Languages such as Java and C# differ from more traditional languages like C, C++ and Fortran in that they execute in the context of a high performance runtime system that supports dynamic loading, dynamic compilation and optimization of code, and garbage collection.  This has lead to a host of new challenges for the programming languages research community.

COMP 4700 is a short course that takes a close look at this new technology.   It should give those pragmatically minded students an insight into a technology of fundamental commercial importance, while giving others a glimpse of some of the most exciting research that is emerging in the programming languages research field today.

The course will use the Jikes RVM (formerly known as Jalapeño) runtime system as a case study and will examine half a dozen high profile papers from the programming languages literature.  Students will design and conduct their own small research project using Jikes RVM.

Lecturer:  Steve Blackburn

Lectures:

More here soon.  The lectures will include 5 student papers (to be confirmed, depending on enrolement).  In addition to an overview of modern runtimes the course will include brief looks at optimizing compiler technology and garbage collection.

Assessment:

We will discuss assessment in the first lecture, but my current inclination is for the following:

• 20% Mini project
• 20% Paper presentation (each student will present a paper)
• 60% Project

Resources