Gregor Richards

Contact

Feel free to email me at gr@purdue.edu, talk to me on Jabber at username gregorr@jabber.org, or AIM on the screen name GregorRP.

Learning

My academic advisor is Jan Vitek.

Research

My research is in programming language design, in particular dynamic and gradually-typed languages. I am interested in designing a gradual typed superset of JavaScript which

• preserves the dynamic power of JavaScript,
• provides static assurance for a reasonable subset of the language,
• makes the boundaries which cause performance problems in gradually-typed systems clear, and
• allows for truly-harmless type evolution (adding types with no effect on dynamic code).

I am currently with a group analyzing the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs. My personal research in this area goes to developing Plof, which at present is just a toy for testing theories in dynamic language design.

Publications

• F. Meawad, G. Richards, F. Morandat, and J. Vitek. Eval begone!: semiautomated removal of eval from JavaScript programs. In OOPSLA, pages 607–620, 2012.
• G. Richards, C. Hammer, B. Burg, and J. Vitek. The eval that men do - a large-scale study of the use of eval in JavaScript applications. In ECOOP, pages 52–78, 2011.
• G. Richards, A. Gal, B. Eich, and J. Vitek. Automated construction of JavaScript benchmarks. In OOPSLA, pages 677–694, 2011.
• G. Richards, S. Lebresne, B. Burg, and J. Vitek. An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs. In PLDI, pages 1–12, 2010.
• B. Bloom, J. Field, N. Nystrom, J. Östlund, G. Richards, R. Strnisa, J. Vitek, and T. Wrigstad. Thorn: robust, concurrent, extensible scripting on the JVM. In OOPSLA, pages 117–136, 2009.
• S. Lebresne, G. Richards, J. Ostlund, T. Wrigstad, and J. Vitek. Understanding the dynamics of JavaScript. In Proceedings for the 1st workshop on Script to Program Evolution, pages 30–33. ACM, 2009.

Teaching

In the spring of 2013 I will be teaching CS352: Compilers: Principles and Practice.

In the past I have been a TA for C, programming languages, software engineering and introductory programming courses.

Code

At my heart I'm a coder. When I learn something new from research, the itch to actually code it up is almost unbearable. Here are a few things I've written that could potentially be useful or interesting to others:

• Plof, a programming language in which the grammar and semantics of the language are defined at runtime, and changeable at any time during execution.
• Fythe, the next generation of Plof's VM. Nowhere near complete yet, but includes an in-progress JIT and shares all of the more dynamic features (language defined at runtime) with Plof.
• GGGGC, or Gregor's General-purpose Generational Garbage Collector. A non-conservative moving garbage collector that is usable from C (with only a few, reasonable restrictions). Reasonably performant and great for writing VMs, e.g. Fythe.

Music

Everybody needs a life outside of research, right? I write music in a neoromantic style influenced by Borodín, Chopin, and various other composers who I'm not particularly worthy of comparing myself to. More information is available on my music page.

Miscellaneous

At the moment, (slightly) more useful information on me can be found at my personal homepage, codu.org. Interested in my hat collection? You can decide which one I'll wear!

The color scheme of this page is randomly generated and validated by a neural network I trained to recognize aesthetically pleasing color combinations. You can get more information on the neural network at http://codu.org/colormatch/, or re-scheme this page.