DATE:Thursday, February 24, 2022
TIME:
12:00 - 1:00 pm
PLACE:
Hybrid with in-person in CIC 4th Floor Panther Hollow Conference Room (4105) AND Zoom. A Zoom link will be emailed to the SDI list closer to the seminar; please do not share this link.

PLEASE NOTE that food and drinks will not be permitted in the room. Please also be mindful to follow CMU's other Covid protocols (please wear your mask, sit distanced from one another, etc.). Thank you.

SPEAKER: Benjamin Titzer, ISR, CMU, Principal Researcher

TITLE: WebAssembly as the Basis For Next-Generation Language Runtime Systems (slides)

ABSTRACT:
WebAssembly is a low-level, portable bytecode offering a compilation target with near-native performance. Now a standard feature of all web browsers, Wasm has started to expand to many other applications such as edge computing, distributed cryptographic digital contracts, networking stacks, and more. As Wasm gains features through the standardization process, it becomes a more attractive target for new kinds of languages. In this talk I will fast-forward to look at a whole new set of language runtime system designs that are made possible with some new features that can be added to Wasm. In particular, can we build a *really* fast language implementation without having to write a new JIT compiler? A new code format (with validator)? A new garbage collector? Can we do this without ever having to look at assembly language? I hope so! Let's look at what I've discovered and what I think that means.

BIO:
Ben L. Titzer is an expert on compiler and language runtime systems with a hybrid industry/research background. He graduated from Purdue in 2002 with a Bachelor's in Computer Science and Mathematics. With Professor Jens Palsberg, he left for UCLA in 2003, where he earned his Master's degree and PhD in Computer Science, in 2004 and 2007. From 2007 to 2010, he was an industry researcher at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. In 2010 he joined Google and in 2013 moved to Germany to work on V8, the JavaScript engine in Chrome. In 2015 he co-founded the WebAssembly project and led its implementation in Chrome, helped to lead an industry alliance that pushed it to become a standard, shipping component in all browsers in 2017. In 2020 he joined Australian National University as a Senior Lecturer and fellow. In January 2022 he joined CMU faculty as a Principal Researcher, working with Heather Miller.

 

VISITOR HOST: Justine Sherry

SDI SEMINAR QUESTIONS?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/