I'm very pleased to announce another interesting pre-print.

This work is lead by @caizixian, in collaboration with Mike Bond and @martin_maas.

We develop a new methodology for measuring the cost of GC, and evaluate JDK17 collectors.

The results are 😬

tinyurl.com/3k244r5p The intuition is simple. If we had a magical zero-cost GC, we could compare costs with a real GC and the difference would be the overhead of the real GC.

Unfortunately there are no magical GCs. So we did something that allows us to place an empirical lower bound on the cost.

I'm delighted to announce LXR ('elixir'), a new low-latency, high-throughput collector, which will appear at PLDI'22 in June.

Work in collaboration with @ksmckinley, led by @wenyuz123.

users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~steveb/pubs/p… We built LXR in OpenJDK 11 (LTS at the time), and evaluate against production collectors.

LXR takes a very different approach to existing production collectors, using advanced reference counting for prompt reclamation, carefully avoiding the overhead of concurrent copying.

It is wrong to encourage students to pull five all-nighters in a row.

Unfortunately faculty in my hemisphere are landed with this prospect by virtualized conferences with a 12 hour schedule that's centered on the North Atlantic. @afd_icl has been doing an incredible job organizing a brilliant @PLDI under extraordinary circumstances. I am in awe of the job he and the team have done.

My message is for @sigplan, @PLDI, and those organizing our next conferences.

Some shots of nature's breathtaking resilience in the wake of this summer's devastating fires...

Nature's signs of hope, emerging even from complete desolation, can be an encouragement to all of us.

1/6 Misty Mountain Road, Clyde Mountain, NSW 2/6 Lake Tabourie, NSW

On my way to ASPLOS 2013, I found myself one-across from an old guy, about 80, neat as a pin, and incredibly fit. He was quietly working on his laptop on a talk about space travel, on a flight to Houston. Everything about him said 'astronaut'.

1/4 On the way out, I noticed the name tag on his carry-on: David Scott.

It was a privilege to have spent a few hours, in silence, one seat across from the guy who’d stood on the moon, and recreated Galileo’s famous experiment!



2/4

My grandad’s story about how a U-boat captain gave him his Iron Cross intrigued me as a kid.

Today I thought I’d see if I could find out anything of this story, and the original owner of the Iron Cross.

It turns out to be even more interesting than I’d guessed.

1/8 By 1944 the Germans were moving U-boats from Europe to Japan. My grandad was chief navigating officer with RAF 621 Sqn, based in Aden, charged with intercepting the U-boats off the horn of Africa.

2/8