Chris Thalinger
From Twitter
Chris Thalinger is a software engineer working on Java Virtual Machines for over 15 years. His main expertise is in compiler technology with Just-In-Time compilation in particular. Initially being involved with the CACAO and GNU Classpath projects, the focus shifted to OpenJDK as soon as Sun made the JDK open-source. Ever since Chris has worked on the HotSpot JVM at Sun, Oracle and now at Twitter.
DevOps, Agile, Methodology & Culture
Performance
In today's Software Development world the number one demand from employers is to deliver features as soon as possible. Everything else is secondary. That means engineers are doing only one thing: writing new code, debugging, and writing new code again. And most of the time this code is running in one of the very convenient clouds. Rarely anyone ever stops and thinks about performance as a whole. If performance is an issue the to-go solution is to throw more money at it. Which usually means buying more computing power in the cloud. But is this really the best way of solving that issue? We should make ourselves aware how wasteful our industry is sometimes and think about ways to avoid that.
Java Language & Server Side
Twitter's quest for a wholly Graal runtime
Twitter is a massively distributed system with thousands of machines running thousands of JVMs. In any similar big system a small change in performance and CPU utilization is multiplied thousandfold and results in big savings. Electricity costs, cooling costs, and possibly reduction of server farm size. One way to improve Java performance and reduce CPU utilization is to simply generate better machine code. Simply is obviously not trivial but doable. Twitter is going down that road and experimenting with Graal to generate better code and reduce cost.