A Concurrent Affair

I’m visiting my friend Luke at Purdue after SIGCSE, and we arranged for me to give a talk to the CS department.

If you have the chance, come grill me on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 3:30 PM.

Computer Science Colloquia Mint: A Multi-stage Extension of Java Mr. Mathias Ricken Rice University LWSN 3102 A/B Monday, March 15, 2010 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 [...]

I just created a new release of Mint and DrJava with Mint: February 17, 2010 (r15116). The release is available from the Mint implementation page:

JavaMint-r15116.tar.gz JavaMint-r15116-binaries.zip drjava-r5178-mint-r15116.jar

There were some small changes in the approximation of weak separability to make the implementation match improvements in the [...]

A few days ago, I changed the Mint compiler to allow non-void code objects to be spliced in where statement form is required:

12Code<Integer> x = <| 1 |>; Code<Void> c = <| { `x } |>;

This essentially generates the code below, which allows the 1 to be discarded:

1<| { { Object temp = 1; } } [...]

I just created a new release of Mint and DrJava with Mint: February 12, 2010 (r15085). The release is available from the Mint implementation page:

JavaMint-r15085.tar.gz JavaMint-r15085-binaries.zip drjava-r5178-mint-r15085.jar

The two changes since the last release involve CSP values and escapes in bracket statements. Instead of storing CSP values in a CSP table, we now store CSP values in individual [...]

The video recording of the Mint talk I gave on Monday is now available on vimeo:

Mint: A Multi-stage Extension of Java (Mathias Ricken) from Mathias Ricken on Vimeo.

Here are a few pictures from yesterday’s talk about Mint.

I just gave the first presentation about Mint in the COMP 600 graduate seminar at Rice. The slides for “Mint: A Multi-stage Extension of Java” are available (PowerPoint, PDF, view embedded). This weekend, I was kicking myself why I had volunteered for this talk out of turn, but it was good practice, and I’m a [...]

Mint: A Multi-stage Extension of Java (PowerPoint, PDF, view embedded) Video recording available on vimeo.

Where: Rice University Computer Science Department, COMP 600 Graduate Seminar When: February 8, 2010

Multi-stage programming (MSP) provides a safe way of generating code at run-time. In mostly-functional languages like MetaOCaml, this has been used to reduce the performance penalties of abstractions such as loops, recursion or interpretation. [...]

Mint: Java Multi-stage Programming Using Weak Separability

2010 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2010)

Multi-stage programming (MSP) provides a disciplined approach to run-time code generation. In the purely functional setting, it has been shown how MSP can be used to reduce the overhead of abstractions, allowing clean, maintainable code without paying performance penalties. Unfortunately, MSP is [...]

I’m happy to report that our Mint paper “Mint: Java Multi-stage Programming Using Weak Separability” has been accepted to PLDI 2010 in Toronto!

I couldn’t find the deadline for submitting the camera-ready version yet, and the reviewer and referee comments aren’t final yet, but I’ll let you know once I know more.

The only disappointing issue is [...]

Today I slept in for the first time in a while. It’s been a tough fortnight, but we finished our PLDI 2010 submission. I feel it is considerably stronger than our previous submissions. Let’s home my confidence is justified.

I just created a new release of Mint and DrJava with Mint.

JavaMint-r14577.tar.gzJavaMint-r14577-binaries.zipdrjava-r5130-mint-r14577.jar

There were some dramatic performance improvements in the Mint compiler thanks to base type lifting instead of performing cross-stage persistence for them. I also fixed a bug that didn’t allow escaping into bracket statements. And DrJava with Mint now has a simple logo (mostly [...]

I’m in the process of porting some scientific code originally written in Fortran, which was then ported to Java, which was then ported to Habanero Java, back to Java, while maintaining a Habanero Java feature called array views. It’s incredibly frustrating… I wish I could replace myself with a short shell script.

Update

Wow, I wish Java [...]

When we examined the code that was generated for the sparse matrix multiplication benchmark of Mint, we noticed that variables containing loop indices had become cross-stage persistent (CSP) variables, which necessitated an array lookup. This was much more expensive than directly accessing a final local variable.

I have now implemented lifting for primitive and boxed types [...]

I added a Matrix Market file reader for the MatrixMultiplySparse benchmark and used the 183-by-138 matrix we had picked out.

The reader seems to work, and if I set the heap size to 1.3 GB, then the compiler almost gets through, but it then blows up in Code.checkLimits. I believe the we are hitting the code [...]

I just committed a small change as a result of profiling Mint programs: We are now treating all compiler invocations as one long compile session, instead of having many short ones during the execution of a Mint program. This reduces overhead since each symbol only needs to be completed once.

Compile times are cut by a [...]

I just made a new release of the all-in-one DrJava with Mint:

drjava-r5121-mint-r14186.jar

On the Mint side, there is only one small change: Previously, the Mint compiler only appeared in the “Compiler” drop-down box if the “Display all compiler versions” preference was enabled, which by default was not the case.

Happy experimentation with Mint!

(Re-posted from The Java Mint [...]

I’m in the process of wrapping up today’syesterday’s loose ends:

I made a new ConcJUnit release, 20091019, containing the files for versions 3.8.2 and 4.7, as described at the end of the last post. There is a new version of DrJava with Mint, DrJava-r5121-Mint-r14186. It is too big to [...]

A while ago, I was told by our one-and-only client of Mint that the version of DrJava with Mint does not display Mint as a compiler, even though it is included in the jar file and therefore should be available. I couldn’t reproduce this, so I set it aside for a while.

Yesterday I realized that [...]

After integrating Mint into DrJava last week, we have now made it even simpler to experiment with Mint: You can download a copy of DrJava that already includes the Mint compiler, all in one file:

DrJava with Mint (check the implementation page for newer versions)

That means on Windows and Linux, provided you have installed the JDK [...]