Design of Programming Languages and Computing Performance

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.