Design of Programming Languages and Computing Performance

在过去十年中，编程语言的大量涌现为实验编程语言特性创造了丰富的环境。编程语言社区已经了解了程序员的偏好以及对某些计算领域有吸引力的特定特性。社区还发现，一些对程序员有吸引力的特性由于限制了代码生成器和优化器生成高效代码的能力而导致了显著的性能成本。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。***本研究项目的长期愿景是为编程语言的发展做出贡献，同时也为支持软件栈的设计和实现做出贡献，这些软件栈可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)描述计算机程序行为的方法和研究；（ii）测量硬件对同步和通信的支持以及硬件加速器设计的实际限制的工具；（iii）责任分析，将特定的语言特性映射到阻碍性能的困难或低效的代码生成。在短期内，研究方案将开发一种方法来描述数据输入变化引起的程序行为变化；它将开发一个特定的方法来确定实际实现中对事务性内存的硬件支持的限制；它还将有助于设计一种新的编程语言，该语言旨在提供有助于快速构建解决方案原型的语言特性，但在包含语言特性时非常明智，以避免可能阻碍代码生成器的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.