A big source of run-time performance problems in large-scale, object-oriented applications is the frequent creation of data structures (by the same allocation site) whose lifetimes are disjoint, and whose shapes and data content are always the same. ...

Applications that combine general program logic with persistent databases (e.g., three-tier applications) often suffer large performance penalties from poor use of the database. We introduce a program analysis technique that combines information flow in ...

Selecting operations based on the run-time type of an object is key to many object-oriented and functional programming techniques. We present a technique for implementing open and efficient type switching on hierarchical extensible data types. The ...

Chaperones and impersonators provide run-time support for interposing on primitive operations such as function calls, array access and update, and structure field access and update. Unlike most interposition support, chaperones and impersonators are ...

Some bugs, among the millions that exist, are similar to each other. One bug-fixing tactic is to search for similar bugs that have been reported and resolved in the past. A fix for a similar bug can help a developer understand a bug, or even directly ...

Reference immutability ensures that a reference is not used to modify the referenced object, and enables the safe sharing of object structures. A pure method does not cause side-effects on the objects that existed in the pre-state of the method ...

Calling context trees are one of the most fundamental data structures for representing the interprocedural control flow of a program, providing valuable information for program understanding and optimization. Nodes of a calling context tree associate ...

Prediction of program dynamic behaviors is fundamental to program optimizations, resource management, and architecture reconfigurations. Most existing predictors are based on locality of program behaviors, subject to some inherent limitations. In this ...

This paper presents a novel type system to promote and facilitate energy-aware programming. Energy Types is built upon a key insight into today's energy-efficient systems and applications: despite the popular perception that energy and power can only be ...

Modern object-oriented languages such as X10 require a rich framework for types capable of expressing both value-dependency and genericity, and supporting pluggable, domain-specific extensions. In earlier work, we presented a framework for constrained ...

Dynamic type-checking and object-oriented programming often go hand-in-hand; scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript all embrace object-oriented (OO) programming. When scripts written in such languages grow and evolve into large ...

Module systems enable a divide and conquer strategy to software development. To implement compile-time variability in software product lines, modules can be composed in different combinations. However, this way, variability dictates a dominant ...

This paper introduces a unified concurrent programming model combining the previously developed Actor Model (AM) and the task-parallel Async-Finish Model (AFM). With the advent of multi-core computers, there is a renewed interest in programming models ...

This paper presents Poli-C, a language extension, runtime library, and system daemon enabling fine-grained, language-level, hierarchical resource management policies. Poli-C is suitable for use in applications that compose parallel libraries, frameworks,...

The data-triggered threads (DTT) programming and execution model can increase parallelism and eliminate redundant computation. However, the initial proposal requires significant architecture support, which impedes existing applications and architectures ...

Abstract Although the study of static and dynamic type systems plays a major role in research, relatively little is known about the impact of type systems on software development. Perhaps one of the more common arguments for static type systems in ...

Modern integrated development environments make recommendations and automate common tasks, such as refactorings, auto-completions, and error corrections. However, these tools present little or no information about the consequences of the recommended ...

Humans can perform many tasks with ease that remain difficult or impossible for computers. Crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk make it possible to harness human-based computational power at an unprecedented scale. However, their ...

The JavaScript programming language, originally developed as a simple scripting language, is now the language of choice for web applications. All the top 100 sites on the web use JavaScript and its use outside web pages is rapidly growing. However, ...

Eval endows JavaScript developers with great power. It allows developers and end-users, by turning text into executable code, to seamlessly extend and customize the behavior of deployed applications as they are running. With great power comes great ...