Erik Ruf

I am a researcher at Microsoft Research.

Research Interests

My interests lie in the area of design and implementation of programming languages, especially “higher-level” language features such as type safety, automated storage management, data/module abstractions, and multithreaded /distributed programming support.  I believe that such features not only improve programmer productivity, but will become essential for maintaining performance as machine and network architectures become ever more complex.  For the past several years, I have concentrated on program analyses supporting advanced optimizations for object-oriented languages.  More recently, my interests have shifted away from performance issues to the programmer’s interaction with languages, libraries, and development environments. 

Current Projects

• I am investigating language design and compilation for data-parallel applications.

Past Projects

• The Perfect system assisted programmers in fixing compile-time errors by automatically suggesting corrections to program source code.
• Improved flow analysis techniques for context-sensitive modeling of object-polymorphic containers.  A preprint of the SAS’02 paper is available on my publications page.
• Design and implementation of Bartok, a research abstraction of the .Net programming platform, with initial work focusing on high level optimizations for C# (see the Advanced Compiler Technology research group).
• Inter-module static analysis techniques enabling code and data transformations (improving/eliminating dispatch, synchronization and storage management operations, object hierarchy and layout) for Java programs.  A paper on optimizing Java synchronization appeared in PLDI’2000.
• "Standard" per-method and inexpensive inter-module optimizations for the Marmot Java compiler.
• The AST Library, which later became the AST Toolkit, which is now used as the program representation for a number of internal software reliability tools.
• Data specialization: an effective, low-overhead program staging technique.
• Sparse dataflow frameworks and points-to analyses for the Value Dependence Graph.
• The FUSE system, a program specializer for Scheme (Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1993).

Publications Online

Contact information

Address: Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 USA
Phone: (425) 706-6111; Fax: (425) 936-7329
Email: my email alias is 'erikruf' at my employer dot com.  No spam, please!
Web: http://www.research.microsoft.com/~ruf/