CS Welcomes Tiark Rompf

10-29-2014

Writer(s): Jesica E. Hollinger

Tiark Rompf is interested in all aspects of programming, in particular programming languages, parallelism and compilers, with a focus on making very high-level programming abstractions more efficient. Overall, he aspires to bring theoretical insights into practical use.

Most of his recent work revolves around Lightweight Modular Staging (LMS) and Delite, technologies for integrating runtime code generation into high-level programs and building embedded compilers for domain specific languages (DSLs). LMS was featured as a research highlight in the Communications of the ACM journal and is used by research groups around the world, including the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab. 

From 2008 to 2014 he was a member of Martin Odersky's team at EPFL that developed the Scala programming language, and he made various contributions to the Scala language and toolchain (delimited continuations, efficient immutable data structures, compiler speedups, type system work). His work at Oracle Labs (since 2012) aims to turn JIT compilers into precision tools in future JVM generations, and is applying LMS to speed up data processing and query engines.

Recently, Tiark received a Best Paper Award at the Very Large Data Bases conference (VLDB) for his paper, Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language, a collaborative effort with Yannis Klonatos, Christoph Koch, and Hassan Chafi. The paper demands a radical rethinking of database systems design. It is the latest in a line to argue that developers can leverage high-level programming languages without having to pay a price in efficiency.

When not working with students, Tiark enjoys practicing martial arts, spending time outdoors, and traveling to far-off places.