Laurie Hendren's Home Page (original) (raw)

Research Description

Historically my main area of research area has been the development of compilers for object-oriented and aspect-oriented programming languages. I also have a long-standing interest in pointer analysis and program analysis frameworks.

My most recent research focus is on how to bring our compiler expertise to the world of scientists and engineers, and in particular how to support effective and efficient programming in the dynamic programming language MATLAB. To kick-start research in this area we are building a toolkit, McLAB, to support language extensions, compiler optimizations and transformations, virtual machines and JITs, and program understanding/refactoring tools for MATLAB and extensions of MATLAB.

I have also started an interdisciplinary research project with colleagues from Radiation Oncology and Medical Physics. The HIG group is designing tools to leverage electronic data for the benefit of clinicians and patients in radiation oncology.

An important facet of my work is that new research ideas should be developed along with software infrastructures to test those ideas. This has led to the development of many publicly available software frameworks, more details can be found on the group's web site at http://www.sable.mcgill.ca . Our research group hopes that other groups will use their software, and will contribute new pieces back them so that all compiler groups can benefit from the work.