Abstraction Without Guilt

By Steve Blackburn

Abstract: While on the one hand systems programmers strive for reliability,
security, and maintainability, on the other hand they depend on performance
and transparent access to low-level primitives. Abstraction is the key tool
for enabling the former but it typically obstructs the latter. This talk
addresses this conundrum from three distinct angles; as a producer, a
consumer, and an evaluator of high level programming languages, and is based
on ten years of experience in each of these roles.  I will discuss my
experience as a producer, engineering a low-overhead, highly-expressive Java
dialect suitable for systems programming.  I will discuss my experience as a
consumer, using Java and object oriented programming principles to build a JVM
and memory management subsystem.  Key to both of these is the role as an
evaluator, measuring and understanding the complex behavior of managed runtime
systems.   The phrase "abstraction without guilt", coined by Ken Kennedy,
nicely captures our  philosophy on systems building.

Bio: Steve Blackburn is an Associate Professor at the Australian National
University.  His interests include memory management, runtime systems,
performance analysis and computer architecture.  Together with his
collaborators, he has produced a number of tools that are in wide use in the
research community, including the DaCapo benchmark suite and the MMTk memory
management toolkit.   He been heavily involved in development of the Jikes RVM
research JVM, and lead the development of the Moxie JVM while at Intel.  He is
actively involved in the research community and was program chair for ISMM
2008 and MSP 2004.