As part of YOW! 2011 (the Australian Software Developer Conference), Simon Peyton Jones and John Hughes will be in Sydney on the 7th and 8th of December 2011. On the evening of the 7th, they will appear at the YOW! Night Sydney.
On Thursday (8 December), John and Simon will give two presentations at the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) of the University of New South Wales. The details are as follows.
Time: 8 December 2011, 10AM
Location: CSE Seminar room (K17_113), Level 1, CSE Building (K17)
Talk #1
Title: Accelerating race condition detection through procrastination
Speaker: John Hughes (Chalmers University & Quviq AB)
Abstract
Race conditions are notoriously frustrating to find, and good tools can help. The main difficulty is reliably provoking the race condition. In previous work we presented a randomising scheduler for Erlang that helps with this task.
In a language without pervasive shared mutable state, such as Erlang, performing scheduling decisions at random uncovers race conditions surprisingly well. However, it is not always enough. We describe a technique, procrastination, that aims to provoke race conditions more often than by random scheduling alone. It works by running the program and looking for pairs of events that might interfere, such as two message sends to the same process. Having found such a pair of events, we re-run the program but try to provoke a race condition by reversing the order of the two events.
We apply our technique to a piece of industrial Erlang code. Compared to random scheduling alone, procrastination allows us to find minimal failing test cases more reliably and more quickly.
John Hughes
John Hughes has worked with functional programming since 1980, was one of the designers of Haskell, and has been heavily involved with Erlang in recent years. In 2000 he and Koen Claessen published the first version of QuickCheck, a software testing tool which recently won the ACM SIGPLAN award for Most Influential Paper from ICFP in that year. He has focussed more and more on testing since then, co-founding Quviq AB in 2006 to market a commercial version of QuickCheck. He is currently both a Professor at Chalmers University, Sweden, and CEO of Quviq AB.
Talk #2
Title: Termination Combinators Forever
Speaker: Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research)
Abstract
Nobody wants their compiler, or theorem prover, to go into an infinite loop, but making sure that never happens usually means applying some over-conservative heuristic like “never unfold a recursive function”. Approaches like that don’t work at all when you are doing partial evaluation or supercompilation, which fundamentally depend on inlining recursive functions.
What we need is an online termination test. That is easier said than done; it is easy to make a mistake. In this talk I’ll describe a new combinator library that lets you build complex termination tests by combining simpler ones, while guaranteeing that that the result really is a termination test. The library elegantly encapsulates some clever mathematical ideas on well-quasi orders the cunning details are hidden from the customer.
I’ll use Haskell as the language of exposition, but you don’t need to be a Haskell guru to understand it, and the library would work equally well in other languages.
Simon Peyton Jones
Simon Peyton Jones, MA, MBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.
His main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He has led a succession of research projects focused around the design and implementation of production-quality functional-language systems for both uniprocessors and parallel machines. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.
More generally, he is interested in language design, rich type systems, software component architectures, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation — that’s one reason he loves functional programming so much.
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