Microbenchmarks in Java and C#

Abstract: Sometimes one wants to measure the speed of software, for instance, to measure whether a new way to solve a problem is faster than the old one. Making such time measurements and microbenchmarks requires considerable care, especially on managed platforms like the Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft’s Common Language Infrastructure (.NET), or else the results may be arbitrary and misleading. Here we give some advice on running microbenchmarks, in particular for managed platforms. Most examples are in Java but the advice applies to any language executed on a managed platform, including Scala, C # and F#. We consider primarily single-threaded non-concurrent applications. 1 The challenge of managed platforms Measuring the execution time of a piece of software is an experimental activity, involving the software and a computer system, itself consisting of much (systems) software and some hardware. Whereas biological experiments, such as measuring bacterial growth, are influenced by natural variation and many unknown circumstances, software performance measurements may seem straightforward: in principle, everything is man-made and under the experimenter’s control. In practice, software performance measurements are influenced by so many factors, and modern computer systems are growing so complex, that software experiments increasingly resemble biological experiments

Early Nordic compilers and autocodes

Abstract. The early development of compilers for high-level program-ming languages, and of so-called autocoding systems, is well documented at the international level but not as regards the Nordic countries. The goal of this paper is to provide a survey of compiler and autocode development in the Nordic countries in the early years, roughly 1953 to 1965, and to relate it to international developments. We also touch on some of the historical societal context

Introduktion til Bourdieus litteraturanalyse

Introduktion til Bourdieus litteraturanalys

Genrens tøven

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre