Bristol Meetups

Dominic Robinson - On reflecting on runtime or "Program, know thyself"

This month's talk is an extract from Dominic Robinson's session at the upcoming ACCU Conference.

On reflecting on runtime or "Program, know thyself"

In a language not renowned for its reflection capabilities we struggle to give programs a view of their own static properties.  So what then of runtime?  Can a program know what it is doing, or why it is doing it? 

If programs can become aware of their own and other program's motives what can we expect? 

"Intention framing" is an experimental technique to provide out of band domain oriented annotations of the intent of executing code. 

This talk will cover: 

• The motivations for Intention Frames. 

• An implementation technique for serial, parallel, and distributed Actor based programs in C++. 

• Opportunities for using Intention Frames in system testing. 

About our Speaker:

Dominic has mis-spent the last 28 years developing video games, flight simulators and software development tools in various assembly languages, C and C++. He founded and sold a video games company during the .com boom and is now a principal engineer at SN Systems, the subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment that is responsible for the development tools for the Sony PlayStation platforms. He has spent the last 6 years developing a fault tolerant, distributed build accelerator in C++ in the style of Erlang.