End of term

December 16, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

My children broke up from school this past weekend, which seems as good a reason as any to call this 'end of term' for The Morning Paper. I'll be taking a break until the New Year, topping up my reading lists and getting ready for a whole new crop of papers and discoveries. The Morning ... Continue Reading

How do committees invent?

December 13, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

How do committees invent?, Conway, Datamation magazine 1968 With thanks to Chris Frost for recommending this paper - another great example of a case where we all know the law (Conway's law in this case), but many of us have not actually read the original ideas behind it. We're back in 1968, a time when ... Continue Reading

A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space

December 11, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space, Bittman et al., HotStorage 2019. This is a companion paper to the "persistent problem" piece that we looked at earlier this week, going a little deeper into the object pointer representation choices and the mapping of a virtual object space into physical address spaces. ...software ... Continue Reading

A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM

December 9, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM Bittman et al., PLOS'19 At the start of November I was privileged to attend HPTS (the High Performance Transaction Systems) conference in Asilomar. If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it. It’s a comparatively small gathering with a great mix of people, and fabulous ... Continue Reading

Benchmarking spreadsheet systems

December 6, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments

Benchmarking spreadsheet systems Rahman et al., Preprint A recent [tweet thread from Aditya Parameswaran]TwThread drew my attention to this pre-print paper. When spreadsheets were originally conceived, data and formula were input by hand and so everything operated at human scale. Increasingly we’re dealing with larger and larger datasets — for example, data imported via csv ... Continue Reading

Declarative assembly of web applications from pre-defined concepts

December 4, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

Declarative assembly of web applications from predefined concepts De Rosso et al., Onward! 2019 I chose this paper to challenge my own thinking. I’m not really a fan of low-code / no-code / just drag-and-drop-from-our-catalogue forms of application development. My fear is that all too often it’s like jumping on a motorbike and tearing off ... Continue Reading

Efficient lock-free durable sets

December 2, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments

Efficient lock-free durable sets Zuriel et al., OOPSLA'19 Given non-volatile memory (NVRAM), the naive hope for persistence is that it would be a no-op: what happens in memory, stays in memory. Unfortunately, a very similar set of issues to those concerned with flushing volatile memory to persistent disk exist here too, just at another level. ... Continue Reading

TLA+ model checking made symbolic

November 29, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments

TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA'19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorithms. In addition to the specification language, the TLA+ toolset includes a model checker (TLC) and a theorem prover (TLAPS). Given the huge state spaces involved in many real-world ... Continue Reading

Mergeable replicated data types – Part II

November 27, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Mergeable replicated data types - part II Kaki et al., OOPLSA '19 Last time out we saw how Mergeable Replicated Data Types (MRDTs) use a bijection between the natural domain of a data type and relational sets to define merge semantics between two concurrently modified versions given their lowest common ancestor (LCA). Today we’re picking ... Continue Reading

Mergeable replicated data types – Part I

November 25, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments

Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA'19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest interest. Mergeable Replicated Data Types (MRDTs) are in the same spirit as CRDTs but with the very interesting property that they compose. Furthermore, a principled ... Continue Reading

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