serious and funny about side effects

We just had a good conversation in the JVM Languages group about how memory is getting weird these days, and how microbenchmarks have always been weird. Please include in this weblog, by reference, my musings on memory and JVMs.

Kudos to Vladimir Sizikov for a nice collection of follow-up links. I was very glad for the introduction to Ulrich Drepper’s paper. He also refers to a new wiki on Hotspot implementation, inspired by and serving the OpenJDK, in which I and others are collecting information to help language and JVM implementors understand how Hotspot works, how to make it better, and how to byte-compile for performance.

Finally, if like me you’ve heard but never quite believed the story about how functional languages fix all the problems with side effects and you laugh at the funny papers, you’ll like this little fable about the perils of mutability, in programming languages. It provides an arresting, hard-hitting, and ultimately crushing new perspective on Hindley-Milner type checkers.

Posted by jrose [JVM] ( April 09, 2008 02:55 PM ) Permalink | Comments[0]