In the April 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM, Mike Shapiro of Sun (or should we say Oracle now?) has an interesting technical article about what he calls “purpose-built languages“. The article was earlier published in ACM Queue. Essentially, it is about domain-specific languages. He describes how many of the most useful little languages in use for the developmentof large systems have grown up without formal design, a grammar, or even a name.
Tag Archives: Sun
Cool Obscure Hardware: Sun SCC and Software License Protection
In a very roundabout way, I recently got to hear about a cool Sun server feature introduced sometime back in 2003 or 2004: the SCC System Configuration Card. This is a smart card that stores the system hostid and Ethernet MACs, along with other info, and which can be transferred from one server to another.
Kunle Olukotun Interview: Heterogeneity, Domain-Specific Programming
The Radio Register has a nice interview with Kunle Olukotun, the man most known for the Afara/Sun Niagara/UltraSparc T1-2-etc. design. It is a long interview, lasting well over an hour, but it is worth a listen. A particular high point is the story on how Kunle worked on parallel processors in the mid-1990s when everyone else was still chasing single-thread performance. He really was a very early proponent of multicore, and saw it coming a bit before most other (general-purpose) computer architects did. Currently, he is working on how to program multiprocessors, at the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory (PPL). In the interview, I see several themes that I have blogged about before being reinforced…
David Ditzel Interview at The Register/Semicoherent Computing
The Register has a few podcasts in addition to their website, and the one called “Semicoherent Computing” has turned into a very nice series of interviews with interesting people from the computer industry. I recently listened to their interview from September 2007 with David Ditzel of Transmeta fame. He had a lot to say about the history of computing, as well as interesting things on where computing is going. Well worth a listen! Particular interesting highlights…
Sun slots transactional memory into Rock
Sun slots transactional memory into Rock | The Register
That is just so cool! For us around Stockholm, we can hear Marc Tremblay talk about this at the SiCS Multicore Day on August 31, 2007.
Solaris to IBM, x86 to Apple, Power to Microsoft, and other flying pig events
The register report “IBM embraces – wtf – Sun’s Solaris across x86 server line” is a very appropriate headline for something quite surprising. The day before this happened, we discussed the announced announcement and said “nah, it can’t be about operating systems”. The idea of IBM in-sourcing Solaris for x86 just felt like the kind of thing that was in the same realm as flying pigs, freezing hells, and similar unlikely events.