Design of Programming Languages and Computing Performance

在过去的十年中，编程语言的大量涌现为编程语言特性的实验创造了丰富的环境。编程语言社区已经了解了很多关于程序员的偏好和对某些计算领域有吸引力的特定功能的信息。社区还发现，一些对程序员有吸引力的功能确实会通过限制代码生成器和优化器生成有效代码的能力来产生显著的性能成本。然而，很少有研究试图将语言特性与编译器优化技术和硬件设计联系起来。该研究计划的长期愿景是促进编程语言的开发，以及支持软件栈的设计和实现，以促进计算解决方案的快速原型设计，同时保持良好的执行性能。对这一目标的贡献包括：（i）方法和研究，以表征计算机程序的行为;（ii）工具，以衡量硬件支持同步和通信和硬件加速器设计的实际限制;（iii）归咎于分析映射特定的语言功能困难，或效率低下，代码生成，阻碍性能。在短期内，该研究方案将制定一种方法，以确定数据输入变化引起的程序行为变化的特征;将制定一种具体方法，以确定实际执行对事务性存储器的硬件支持的限制;它也将有助于设计一种新的编程语言，旨在提供语言功能，促进快速原型的解决方案，非常明智地包含语言特性，以避免可能妨碍代码生成器工作并导致性能降低的特性。

The vast proliferation of programming languages in the past decade has created a rich environment for experimentation with programming language features. The programming language community has learned much about programmers' preferences and about specific features that are attractive to certain domains of computing. The community has also discovered that some features that are attractive to programmers do incurr a significant performance cost by limiting the ability of code generators and optimizers to produce efficient code. However, very few studies have attempted to connect language features with compiler optimization techniques and hardware design.***The long-term vision for this research program is to contribute to the development of programming languages and also to the design and implementation of the supporting software stack that facilitates rapid prototyping of computing solutions while sustaining good execution performance. The contributions toward this aim include: (i) methodology and studies to characterize the behaviour of computer programs; (ii) tools to measure the actual limitations both of hardware support for synchronization and communication and of hardware accelerator designs; (iii) a blame analysis to map specific language features to difficult, or inefficient, code generation that hinders performance. In the short term the research program will develop a methodology to characterize program-behaviour changes that are caused by changes to data inputs; it will develop a specific methodology to determine the limitations in actual implementations of hardware support for transactional memories; and it will also contribute for the design of a new programming language that aims to deliver language features that facilitate rapid prototyping of solutions but that is very judicious in the inclusion of language features to avoid features that could hinder the job of a code generator and lead to lower performance.