Tuesday, June 15, 2010

STM, GC, and other hot Java topics

I haven't spent much time blogging recently; all my spare cycles are spent keeping track of events overseas.

But I wanted to briefly take note of Cliff Click's wonderful review notes from his whirlwind conference tour in early June.

The first note is about Software Transactional Memory, and describes Dr. Click's visit to Portugal to meet with Dr. Cachopo's team at Lisbon Technical University. The work on JVSTM apparently much impressed Click, as he wrote:

This is the first time I've heard of an STM being used in a production setting - with success. The system is clearly alive and well, the STM plays a crucial role in both the performance and ease-of-maintenance in the system. I've talked with a number of people who tried really hard in the past to apply an STM to their particular situation, and for whatever the reason those systems eventually got declared failures.

...

My more dedicated readers can probably detect a shift in my attitude towards STMs here. To be fair, this Microsoft blog summarizes my attitude towards STMs for the past three years... and my opinion has mostly not changed. In short: highly negative, and lacking a killer app. I think Joao may have found the killer app for STMs.


Click's second note reviews his experiences at the combined ISMM/PLDI 2010 conference. As usual, his notes are very dense, but detailed enough to help the interested reader decide which talks/presentations are intriguing enough to be worth further study.

I'm very interested in high-end tools for debugging, tuning, and comprehending the behavior of the enormously complex software systems that are being built in Java nowadays, so I was particularly interested in:

If I find some time I'll try to look up more information about these projects.

Now, back to soccer... :)

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