Stefan Fehrenbach
2014-09-19

Goodbye Marburg!

Yesterday, I defended my Master’s thesis Just-in-time Compilation for Generalized Parsing. Syntactically extensible programming languages need to deal with frequently changing grammars. Parser generators are not well-suited for this domain. Grammar interpreters, on the other hand, tend to be too slow to be viable in practice. In my thesis, I used a language implementation framework called Truffle to turn grammar interpreters into just-in-time compiled parsers. The results are mixed. On the one hand, my implementation is not immediately applicable to, e.g., SugarJ. On the other hand, the general approach is promising and certainly warrants further attention. I hope I will find some time to at least properly publish the results.

Hello Edinburgh!

With the defense, after six years in lovely Marburg, my stay here is coming to an end. Next week, I will fly to Edinburgh, one way. There I will pursue a PhD on programming languages and provenance. Exciting times ahead :-)