Onward! 2017
Sun 22 - Fri 27 October 2017 Vancouver, Canada
co-located with SPLASH 2017
Fri 27 Oct 2017 11:00 - 11:30 at Regency B - Usability and Performance Chair(s): Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

On current architectures, the optimisation of an application’s performance often involves data being stored according to access affinity — what is accessed together should be stored together, rather than logical affinity — what belongs together logically stays together. Such low level techniques lead to faster, but more error prone code, and end up tangling the program’s logic with low-level data layout details.

Our vision, which we call SHAPES, is that the layout of a data structure should be defined only once, upon instantiation, and the remainder of the code should be layout agnostic. This enables performance improvements while also guaranteeing memory safety, and supports the separation of program logic from low level concerns. In this paper we investigate how this vision can be supported by extending a programming language.

We describe the core language features supporting this vision: classes can be customized to support different layouts, and layout information is carried around in types; the remaining source code is layout-unaware and the compiler emits layout-aware code. We then discuss our SHAPES implementation through a prototype library, which we also used for preliminary evaluations. Finally, we discuss how the core could be expanded so as to deliver SHAPES’s full potential: the incorporation of compacting garbage collection,
ad hoc polymorphism and late binding, synchronization of representations of different collections, support for dynamic change of representation, etc.

Fri 27 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

10:30 - 12:00
Usability and PerformanceOnward! Papers at Regency B
Chair(s): Sam Tobin-Hochstadt Indiana University
10:30
30m
Talk
Error Messages are Classifiers: A Process to Design and Evaluate Error Messages
Onward! Papers
John Wrenn Brown University, Shriram Krishnamurthi Brown University, USA
11:00
30m
Talk
You Can Have it All: Abstraction and Good Cache Performance
Onward! Papers
Juliana Franco Imperial College London, Martin Hagelin (Dirac), Tobias Wrigstad Uppsala University, Sophia Drossopoulou , Susan Eisenbach Imperial College London
11:30
30m
Talk
Garbology: A Study of How Java Objects Die
Onward! Papers
Raoul Veroy Tufts University, Sam Guyer Tufts University