Development

Vol. 11 No. 10 – October 2013

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Development

Bugs and Bragging Rights:
It’s not always size that matters.

Dear KV, I’ve been dealing with a large program written in Java that seems to spend most of its time asking me to restart it because it has run out of memory.

by George Neville-Neil

Making the Web Faster with HTTP 2.0:
HTTP continues to evolve

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is one of the most widely used application protocols on the Internet. Since its publication, RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1) has served as a foundation for the unprecedented growth of the Internet: billions of devices of all shapes and sizes, from desktop computers to the tiny Web devices in our pockets, speak HTTP every day to deliver news, video, and millions of other Web applications we have all come to depend on in our everyday lives.

by Ilya Grigorik

The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability:
Interfacing between languages is increasingly important.

Interoperability between languages has been a problem since the second programming language was invented. Solutions have ranged from language-independent object models such as COM (Component Object Model) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) to VMs (virtual machines) designed to integrate languages, such as JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and CLR (Common Language Runtime). With software becoming ever more complex and hardware less homogeneous, the likelihood of a single language being the correct tool for an entire program is lower than ever. As modern compilers become more modular, there is potential for a new generation of interesting solutions.

by David Chisnall

Intermediate Representation:
The increasing significance of intermediate representations in compilers

Program compilation is a complicated process. A compiler is a software program that translates a high-level source language program into a form ready to execute on a computer. Early in the evolution of compilers, designers introduced IRs (intermediate representations, also commonly called intermediate languages) to manage the complexity of the compilation process. The use of an IR as the compiler’s internal representation of the program enables the compiler to be broken up into multiple phases and components, thus benefiting from modularity.

by Fred Chow