Tobias, my advisor, gave a presentation at the SICS Software Week 2016’s Multicore Day in Stockholm. What I like about our group is that the range of work we span is quite wide — it ranges from the development of type systems down to the nasty details of optimising garbage collection.

In the talk, he starts by briefly covering some of the more recent work I’ve done on Spencer.

After that, he also talks about Kappa, a type system for preventing data races in OO programs that my colleague Elias Castegren has been working on (published at ECOOP’16 preprint and IWACO’16, preprint). Kappa is currently being integrated into Encore, and I’m really excited about it.

Another thing Tobias mentions is work that our group, mainly Albert Yang, is doing in collaboration with Sophia Drossopoulou and Juliana Franco at Imperial College, London that tries to exploit type information for giving objects more efficient memory layouts at runtime, and to use the information a type system gives for (much) more efficient garbage collection. Although this work hasn’t been published yet (and therefore, I will neither fully trust, nor quote performance numbers), I believe that this line of work could be one of the necessary steps towards the better future in which correctness and performance are aligned goals.