Interesting Papers

This page contains links to slides, books and papers that I’ve found interesting to read while working on Perl 6 related things.

Metamodels

• Uniform and safe metaclass composition – using roles to deal with meta-class compatibility issues. Note that Rakudo’s metaobjects are factored using roles.
• Avoiding Confusion in Meta-Circularity: The Meta-Helix – essentially proposes a delegatory model. Not something that’s possible for the Perl 6 meta-programmer just out of the box, but maybe a suggested “recipe”. Worth reading the paper for the overall discussion of meta-circularity.
• The Art of the Metaobject Protocol – must-read book for those new to the idea of metaobjects. Examples are in Common Lisp, but still very readable even if you’re not much of a Lisp hacker, and contains a wealth of information. Section on bootstrapping is a bit of a handwave, though…

Optimization

• A Simple, Fast Dominance Algorithm – the dominance tree and dominance frontier computation algorithm used in MoarVM. Also an interesting example of where good engineering can outstrip asymptotic complexity in the real world.
• Efficiently Computing Static Single Assignment Form and the Control Dependence Graph – the SSA transform described in this paper is also used in MoarVM.
• Dynamic Code Management: Improving Whole Program Code Locality in Managed Runtimes

Garbage Collection

• The Garbage Collection Handbook – the shiny new second edition. Basically, THE book on this topic.
• Finding Your Cronies: Static Analysis for Dynamic Object Colocation
• Detecting Memory Leaks in Managed Languages with Cork – an approach to spotting memory leaks in GC-managed object
• Immix: A Mark-Region Garbage Collector with Space Efficiency, Fast Collection, and Mutator Locality

Concurrency

• Pacer: Proportional Detection of Data Races

Runtime/VM Design

• Understanding CPU Caches – what it says on the tin. Not a load of detail, but the points it makes are good ones. Worth a look through.
• Dynamic Compilation and Adaptive Optimization in Virtual Machines – excellent set of slides on JIT compilation. Long, but worthwhile if you’re seriously interested in this area.
• .NET Type Internals – From a Microsoft CLR Perspective – a decent overview of how the CLR handles a bunch of things. Nothing revolutionary, but a useful data point in VM design space.
• A talk about LuaJIT – dives into its tracing, etc.

Types

• What is Gradual Typing? – an introduction to gradual typing from one of its creators
• Gradual Typing for Objects – a meeting of OOP and gradual typing
• Uncertain<T>: A First-Order Type for Uncertain Data

OO

• Traits: Composable Units of Behaviour – the original paper on traits (which we know as roles in Perl 6)

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