Erik had just read an article - Every Programmer Should Know These Latency Numbers - and it got him thinking...

Here, Erik discusses his perspective on latency. We also discuss native relativity, energy efficient programming (what does that mean?) and nutrition labels for software . As usual, this is classic C9: the conversation just happens and it's all captured in audio and video. Whiteboarding included. Twists and turns, too.

Always a real pleasure to get the chance to geek out with Erik. Thank you, Dr. Meijer!

And remember, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but moved from state to state and place to place. It should be fairly obvious how this relates to the energy required to compute your code in this age of clouds and battery-powered personal computers (aka phones...). How much energy does your code use? How could type systems help here (could they?)?

Tune in. Think.

Here, Bart J.F. De Smet - the lead developer of Rx - and Matthew sit down for a C9 conversation about RxJS (no demos or code-on-screen - this is purely a conversation). Who knows where it will go (will we only talk about RxJS?) and who'll make a cameo appearance at the very beginning Tune in.

Enjoy!

Follow Matthew: @mattpodwysocki

Tune in. Enjoy. (And remember to tell Mohsen what's on your mind regarding what he asks you in this conversation.)

Questions/Topics (click the link to navigate to the topic/question):

What does your team do at the Microsoft Hawaii office?

On the C++ Renaissance...

Mohsen asks you -> How are you actually using C++ today?

Mohsen asks you -> How do you think about the breadth of the language for mainstream scenarios (web services, data access, data snacking applications, etc)? Are you using C++ for these types of things? How broad should we think about the language beyond systems?

On concurrency...

How do you allocate resources on the VC team (so, how do you determine where to place human investments)?

Do you have a sense of how many VC++ developers actually use any of the other language tools inside of Visual Studio—so, would VC be able to ship faster if it wasn't bound to VS? (Yes, a weird Charles question born in situ during the conversation!).

How you feel personally about the state of the C++ language (were you upset that Concepts didn't make it in to C++11, for example?) ?

On C...

What do you think of the language Go?

Error reporting quality, templates and exceptions...

On C++ and JavaScript...

What do you want to see added to (or what's missing today in) the C++ language/libraries/tools? (Mohsen asks you -> What existing libraries should become de facto standards like the STL?)

As usual when talking to Herb, the conversation is all about C++ (well, we do talk about C# for a little while, but in the context of C++. Why?).

See below for the specific questions that were asked. You can simply click on a link to move directly to that point in the conversation. I do, however, strongly recommend that you watch the entire thing. I also recommend that you don't get used to this level of categorization in my videos (it takes a fair amount of time to do this sort of thing, so enjoy the times when I actually do this, but don't expect me to do this all of the time ).

It's always great to talk to Herb and get a glimpse of what goes on in the C++ Standards Committee (which Herb chairs). In this specific conversation, it's uplifting to see how excited Herb is for the future of one of the world's most capable and widely used general purpose programming languages. C++ is a modern programming language for power and performance, but it's also a highly abstracted general purpose language for building user mode applications, mobile apps, etc. The amazing part is how C++ can provide rich general programming abstractions and also ensure that your code can run at machine speeds. We talk about this, of course.

Tune in. Learn. Go native!

1:37 -> What were the goals of the C++0x standard, at a high level?

2:40 -> Language and Library abstractions and performance (how high can you go and still be fast as possible?)...

5:23 -> C++ as an application development language (in addition to the traditional C++ is a systems programming language meme)...

07:17 -> C++0x or can we now call it C++11?

09:21 -> Standards committees and real world user representation...

10:39 -> Who comes up with the new features that get standardized (or not...)?

13:01 -> What were the goals of the C++0x standard (non-canned answer)?

14:21 -> What does Bjarne mean by C++0x being a better C++ for novice programmers?

15:51 -> Why can't C++ look more like C#?

18:50 -> At the end of the day, everything(in terms of programmer-controlled computing) boils down to memory, right?

23:12 -> What are some of the most significant new features in C++0x?

25:05 -> What can VC++ developers expect to see in terms of C++0x implementation in Visual C++ next?

27:09 -> C++ and type safety...

29:05 -> C++0x and backwards compatibility: any big breaking changes?

34:16 -> C++0x in the Standard Library...

37:01 -> Any thinking in the Committee about doing much more frequent experimental releases of C++?

39:04 -> Are their features that didn't make it into the standard that you really wanted to be standardized?

41:45 -> Are you comfortable with C++'s current state? Is it modern enough?

43:22 -> Conclusion (or Charles doesn't end the conversation when his farewell begins - where does it go from there? )

The Singularity project (an OS written in managed code used for research purposes) has provided several very useful research results and opened new avenues for exploration in operating system design. Recently, MSR released a paper covering an operating system research project that takes a new approach to building an OS stack with verifiable and type safe managed code. This project employs a novel use of Typed Assembly Language, which is what you think it is: Assembly with types (implemented as annotations and verified statically using the verification technology Boogie and the theorem prover Z3(Boogie generates verification conditions that are then statically proven by Z3. Boogie is also a language used to build program verifiers for other languages)). As with Singularity, the C# Bartok compiler is used, but this time it generates TAL. The entire OS stack is verifiably type safe (the Nucleus is essentially the Verve HAL) and all objects are garbage collected. It does not employ the SIP model of process isolation (like Singularity). In this case, again, the entire operating system is type safe and statically proven as such using world-class theorem provers. 

Here's the basic idea (from the introduction of the paper):

Typed assembly language (TAL) and Hoare logic can verify the absence of many kinds of errors in low-level code. We use TAL and Hoare logic to achieve highly automated, static verification of the safety of a new operating system called Verve. Our techniques and tools mechanically verify the safety of every assembly language instruction in the operating system, run-time system, drivers, and applications (in fact, every part of the system software except the boot loader). Verve consists of a “Nucleus” that provides primitive access to hardware and memory, a kernel that builds services on top of the Nucleus, and applications that run on top of the kernel.

Here, Microsoft research scientist and operating system expert (he worked on the Singularity project) Chris Hawblitzel sits down with me to discuss the rationale behind the Verve project, the architecture and design of Verve and the Nucleus, Typed Assembly Language (TAL), potential for Verve in the real world, and much more. This is a conversational piece (no demos, no whiteboarding), but if you are into operating research and strategies for building type safe systems at the lowest levels, then this is for you. If you are interested, perhaps we could get Chris into our studio for a lecture or two on OS design.

Niner Richard Hein's question is asked here.

Get the Verve source code here.

Enjoy. Learn.

Not too long ago, a thread in the Coffeehouse was posted asking for your IE9 questions for Dean Hachamovitch, VP of Engineering for Internet Explorer. Thank you for asking such great questions, Niners! We didn't have time cover all of them, but we did manage to get through several of them (and there was some redundancy, too, so I took the liberty of choosing the questions. Also, I didn't ask any of the snarkier questions (though I probably could have, since Dean can handle it) and Dean did not want to see the questions before they were asked (which is commonplace among many executives). He's OldSchool9 that way and that's great!).

IE9 PP7 was released today and inside of it is one of the world's fastest JS engines (according to the SunSpider suite of JS performance tests, IE9 PP7 is faster than all other browsers out there...). Chakra, the IE9 JS engine, continues to evolve! Hats off to the Chakra team. Interestingly, Dean isn't overly excited about this news (though, obviously, he's thrilled) since JS execution speed is but one part of the overall performance story, which is actually divided into several pieces, not just two or three (see Jason Weber's quick chat on the overall performance characteristics that combine to form a user's experience of blazing fast web surfing, and read the IE team's blog post on the subject).

Here are the unedited questions Dean answered in this morning's conversation in the IE engineering building. Thank you, Dean, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to engage Niners' questions and concerns in an honest and open way. There is bonus footage at the end, too 

I recommend watching all of this as the flow is nice and the questions lead into one another nicely. Great job, Niners! This is a 51 minute interview, which is a long time in VP Time. Dean's a big fan of yours, Niners.

[Questions begin at 00:14:15, asked in the order listed below. Click on a question to go directly to the answer in the video. I do recommend that you watch/listen to the entire conversation as it flows naturally from question to question with many questions and answers nicely building on those that come before and after...]

CKurt:

How you do personally feel about the way the HTML 5 standard is progressing? It's talking such a long time to form, it's slowing down the evolution of the uniform internet and causing more and more fragmentation between browsers. Is it not?

Bas:

What if the HTML5 standard changes/is finalized within IE9's lifetime and before IE10 is out. What's going to happen? A patch?

JoshRoss:

Windows 7 had a tremendous amount of telemetry captured from the beta users and that information was immensely valuable. Was or is there any telemetry data collected from current or past testers?

Exoteric:

How do you measure Internet Explorer stability and when it's ready for RTM? Does the beta have any kind of telemetry for latencies: when the GUI freezes, when a page takes a long time to load, etc.
How many test cases do you have for IE9 at this point?

ZippyV:

Will we be able to write javascript or .net plugins for IE? We need an easier way to interact deeply with the browser but writing native plugins is too difficult and accelerators can't go deep enough.

Nazmus1992:

Are you anxious to see if Mozilla actually sends in a cake to the IE team when IE9 ships?

Do you plan to have IE score a 100 in the acid3 test?

Typhoon87:

Will platform previews continue after RTW release so we can see where you are heading for the next release? You seem to be about a 6 week or so window for the platform previews currently.

Any possibility of smaller update window between releases? eg will we be likely to see IE 9.1 or 9.5 that is smaller in scope but quicker to market?

US Archer:

What improvements have been made around touch support?  Is the UI fully baked in this Beta?

What is the state of webslices, something you still encourage site developers to implement?  For IE9, it would be really useful if we could preview these from the pinned site icon.

AndyC:

Does the IE team still feel like they're playing catch up or are they now at a point where future versions of IE might start to drive new ideas once again?

Dr. Gurevich is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is currently a principle research scientist in Wolfram Schulte’s RiSE team (Research in Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research).

Originally, Dr. Gurevich started his career as an algebraist. Later he became a logician. Then he moved to computer science, where his main projects have been Abstract State Machines, Average Case Computational Complexity, and Finite Model Theory. Dr. Gurevich has been honored as a Dr. Honoris Causa of the University of Limburg, Belgium (1998), as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1996), as well as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995).

Dr. Gurevich's fundamental work on the theory of Abstract State Machines (ASMs) is of paramount importance for theoretical and applied computer science. The significance of the theoretical concepts developed by Gurevich is confirmed by the substantial impact they have on mathematical modeling of discrete dynamic systems.

*This is probably the only interview in C9's history where a good case is made for imperative programming versus declarative and functional (this starts right off the bat at around 02:31).

Read Yuri's Annotated Articles

Tune in. Meet Yuri Gurevich.