Brandon Hill

DSL engineering in industry (Spoofax at Oracle Labs)

Abstract: As the position and role of industrial research labs shifts, so must the way they work. The partnerships between such labs and their academic counterparts must reflect the same increased expectation of transferable results that the labs receive from their parent companies. This talk will look at how collaboration between Oracle Labs and language development projects such as the Spoofax team fits this requirement, and creates deeper partnerships that benefit both parties. This collaboration has allowed Oracle Labs to pursue advances that benefit several research projects at once. Meanwhile, the Spoofax team has gained a broader set of users that help explore the bounds of what development teams need to make language workbenches viable.

Bio: Brandon Hill has worked on problems across the computer science spectrum. From virtual reality systems, to supercomputing, to language performance, to language support for embedded systems, all of his work has been shared the underlying focus of performance. Execution speed determines the limits of what we can do, and development speed determines the limits of what we are willing to do. Currently working as a language engineer at Oracle Labs, Brandon’s current work explores how domain specific languages can make performance more accessible.