Inaugural lecture by Jean Pichon: Elucidating Systems Programming

Title: Elucidating Systems Programming
 
Abstract: We teach things like compilers and operating systems to students. They get a high-level idea, but definitely feel worse off than their friends over at civil engineering or electronics.
We have no clear understanding of many of the mechanisms they will have to use in their day jobs: What happens if they update page tables in this specific way? What happens if they run this compiler optimisation on this concurrent program?
And even when this knowledge exists, it is often locked as informal safe recipes inside the experts' heads, instead of written down as accessible mathematically precise definitions that programmers can use to get definite answers.
Faced with this overall confusion, programmers cobble programs together, hoping for the best. The resulting bugs impact our daily lives.
I will talk about using the methods of programming language theory to elucidate low-level and systems programming, focusing on how shared memory programming exhibits so-called relaxed memory, and its interaction with virtual memory.