Is it time to go stackless?

As a follow-up on Guy Steele's post on tail recursion referenced on my last one and Cook's paper, there's another interesting post by Gilad Bracha that made me wonder: is it time to go stackless?

The stack, as an optimization for call convention is deeply rooted into greatly extended instruction sets. But now, with the amounts of RAM and CPU power available and the really cheap short-lived object allocation time in modern VMs, I think we could afford it, at least for high level languages.

Back in my Python days, I remember Stackless Python, an implementation of this programming language with support for continuations, generators and coroutines.

And this would be only the beginning...

Tail calls in OOLs

Yesterday's paper is also related to a very interesting post by Guy L. Steele Jr. on the need of tail calls on object-oriented languages. A rather polemic issue with strong proponents (such as Guy) and detractors, like Guido Van Rossum, Python's creator.

I'm sure more interesting contributions will follow.

Readings on Dec 6th 2009

Today's reading has been "On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited" by William R. Cook. It has really been an eye-opener on the differences between abstract data types and objects, and it have helped me  understand the implication of the different approaches taken by different programming languages.

Highly recommended.

Lucene 2.9.0

A few weeks ago Lucene 2.9.0 was released. The list of changes is impressive, and it's certainly an interim release paving the way to release 3.0, where I suppose many of the now deprecated methods will start to disappear.

One of the most interesting changes for me is LUCENE-1382, which will greatly simplify checkpoint management in lucis.

Looking forward to 3.0.

Functional dependencies

Regarding papers, yesterday's read was Type Classes with Functional Dependencies by Mark P. Jones.

Quite interesting.

CUFP 2009 Keynote

Bryan O’Sullivan is one of the authors of the book Real World Haskell, and he's given the keynote at CUFP 2009.

CUFP 2009 Keynote - Real World Haskell

View more documents from Bryan O’Sullivan.

I really liked the presentation.

Papers

Over the last years I've become an avid reader of papers. As the time goes by, I start to have heaps of PDF files scattered through multiple files and computers, unable to find anything.

A few years ago I read in Ars Technica about Papers, a software package that seemed to fulfill all my paper archiving needs :). However, it wasn't until last month that I gave it a try and I only regret not having donde so earlier. Its matching capabilities, search engine and spotlight integration are really wonderful. It is really the iTunes of academic papers.

Highly recommended.