The Constness Problem
These days, I spend most of my programming time working on the Higgs JavaScript JIT compiler for my thesis, and most of the code I write is in D. I don’t always take the time to write the best, most...
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Dogfooding Higgs with the Turing Turtle
A while back, I wrote Turing Drawings, a JavaScript web app which uses randomly generated Turing machines to produce animated drawings on an HTML5 canvas element. The web app, due to its addictive...
View ArticleFaster than V8 *
There’s an asterisk next to the title because in most cases, Higgs doesn’t beat the performance of Google’s V8, quite the opposite. I’ve mentioned in my post about D’s garbage collector performance...
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Pushing Higgs to the Limit
Over a week ago, I received the unfortunate news that my basic block versioning paper was rejected for the third time. We had received five “weak accept” scores, but at the last minute, after the...
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The Fastest For-In Loops in the Whole Wide Web
This Monday, I met with Marc Feeley, my PhD advisor. I showed him graphs comparing the performance of Higgs to that of the TraceMonkey compiler. Reviewers at conferences we’ve previously submitted...
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My Thesis: A Clearer Picture
In December, I submitted a paper about my work on basic block versioning to ECOOP 2015. Basic block versioning (BBV for short) is a technique to specialize machine code in order to eliminate type...
View ArticleBasic Block Versioning – Published At Last!
Over a month ago, I received reviews for the basic block versioning paper I submitted to ECOOP 2015. The reviews were again mixed, ranging from great to terrible. After 3 previous rejections at other...
View ArticleThe Problem with HTML
The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was invented by Physicist Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, and its first publicly available specification surfaced on the internet in 1991. It was meant intended as a...
View ArticleJavaScript is the C++ of the Web
When I started my PhD, back in 2009, I told my advisor I wanted to work on optimizing dynamic programming languages. A big part of my thesis was going to involve the implementation of a JIT compiler...
View ArticleMethod Call Syntax in a JS-like Language
As a side-project, I’m working on a small JavaScript-like programming language called Plush. Like JavaScript, this language is going to have objects and method calls. In this blog post, I’m going to...
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