@phdthesis{Pape2021,
  author    = {Pape, Tobias},
  title     = {Efficient compound values in virtual machines},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-49913},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-499134},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xxix, 242},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {Compound values are not universally supported in virtual machine (VM)-based programming systems and languages. However, providing data structures with value characteristics can be beneficial. On one hand, programming systems and languages can adequately represent physical quantities with compound values and avoid inconsistencies, for example, in representation of large numbers. On the other hand, just-in-time (JIT) compilers, which are often found in VMs, can rely on the fact that compound values are immutable, which is an important property in optimizing programs. Considering this, compound values have an optimization potential that can be put to use by implementing them in VMs in a way that is efficient in memory usage and execution time. Yet, optimized compound values in VMs face certain challenges: to maintain consistency, it should not be observable by the program whether compound values are represented in an optimized way by a VM; an optimization should take into account, that the usage of compound values can exhibit certain patterns at run-time; and that necessary value-incompatible properties due to implementation restrictions should be reduced. We propose a technique to detect and compress common patterns of compound value usage at run-time to improve memory usage and execution speed. Our approach identifies patterns of frequent compound value references and introduces abbreviated forms for them. Thus, it is possible to store multiple inter-referenced compound values in an inlined memory representation, reducing the overhead of metadata and object references. We extend our approach by a notion of limited mutability, using cells that act as barriers for our approach and provide a location for shared, mutable access with the possibility of type specialization. We devise an extension to our approach that allows us to express automatic unboxing of boxed primitive data types in terms of our initial technique. We show that our approach is versatile enough to express another optimization technique that relies on values, such as Booleans, that are unique throughout a programming system. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to re-use learned usage patterns and optimizations across program runs, thus reducing the performance impact of pattern recognition. We show in a best-case prototype that the implementation of our approach is feasible and can also be applied to general purpose programming systems, namely implementations of the Racket language and Squeak/Smalltalk. In several micro-benchmarks, we found that our approach can effectively reduce memory consumption and improve execution speed.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FreudenbergIngallsFelgentreffetal.2015,
  author    = {Freudenberg, Bert and Ingalls, Dan and Felgentreff, Tim and Pape, Tobias and Hirschfeld, Robert},
  title     = {SqueakJS A Modern and Practical Smalltalk that Runs in Any Browser},
  series = {ACM SIGPLAN notices},
  volume    = {50},
  journal   = {ACM SIGPLAN notices},
  number    = {2},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0362-1340},
  doi       = {10.1145/10.1145/2661088.2661100},
  pages     = {57 -- 66},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {We report our experience in implementing SqueakJS, a bitcompatible implementation of Squeak/Smalltalk written in pure JavaScript. SqueakJS runs entirely in theWeb browser with a virtual file system that can be directed to a server or client-side storage. Our implementation is notable for simplicity and performance gained through adaptation to the host object memory and deployment leverage gained through the Lively Web development environment. We present several novel techniques as well as performance measurements for the resulting virtual machine. Much of this experience is potentially relevant to preserving other dynamic language systems and making them available in a browser-based environment.},
  language  = {en}
}
@book{BeckmannHildebrandJascheketal.2019,
  author    = {Beckmann, Tom and Hildebrand, Justus and Jaschek, Corinna and Krebs, Eva and L{\"o}ser, Alexander and Taeumel, Marcel and Pape, Tobias and Fister, Lasse and Hirschfeld, Robert},
  title     = {The font engineering platform},
  number    = {128},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-464-7},
  issn      = {1613-5652},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-42748},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-427487},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {viii, 115},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {Creating fonts is a complex task that requires expert knowledge in a variety of domains. Often, this knowledge is not held by a single person, but spread across a number of domain experts. A central concept needed for designing fonts is the glyph, an elemental symbol representing a readable character. Required domains include designing glyph shapes, engineering rules to combine glyphs for complex scripts and checking legibility. This process is most often iterative and requires communication in all directions. This report outlines a platform that aims to enhance the means of communication, describes our prototyping process, discusses complex font rendering and editing in a live environment and an approach to generate code based on a user's live-edits.},
  language  = {en}
}