Welcome to the.gregor.institute, academic home of Gregor Richards.
I am an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo School of
Computer Science. My office is DC2508. When applicable, my office hours
are listed on the course web page of the course I am currently
teaching. Students are advised to look there.
Feel free to email me at , talk to me on
Jabber/XMPP/Google Chat at username
gregorr@jabber.org, or AIM on the screen name
GregorRP.
Teaching
In the fall of 2016 I am teaching CS350: Operating Systems.
My research is in programming language and virtual machine design, in
particular dynamic and gradually-typed languages. I am interested in
designing a gradually-typed superset of JavaScript which
preserves the dynamic power of JavaScript,
provides static assurance for a reasonable subset of the
language,
makes the boundaries which cause performance problems in
gradually-typed systems clear, and
allows for truly-harmless type evolution (adding types with no
effect on dynamic code).
Concrete Types for TypeScript
ECOOP 2015. Gregor Richards, Francesco Zappa Nardelli and Jan Vitek.
My PhD dissertation, titled Refinement of Web Software Motivated by Real-World Patterns derives from my previous work below, and additionally describes a gradual type system for JavaScript.
Flexible Access Control for JavaScript
OOPSLA 2013. Gregor Richards, Christian Hammer, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, Suresh Jagannathan and Jan Vitek. [pdf]
One VM to Rule Them All
Onward! 2013. Thomas Würthinger, Christian Wimmer, Andreas Wöß, Lukas Stadler, Gilles Duboscq, Christian Humer, Gregor Richards, Doug Simon and Mario Wolczko. [pdf]
Eval Begone!: Automated Removal of Eval from JavaScript Programs
OOPSLA 2012. Fadi Meawad, Gregor Richards and Jan Vitek. [pdf]
Automated Construction of JavaScript Benchmarks
OOPSLA 2011. Gregor Richards, Andreas Gal, Brendan Eich and Jan Vitek. [pdf]
The Eval that Men Do — A Large-scale Study of the Use of Eval in JavaScript Applications
ECOOP 2011. Gregor Richards, Christian Hammer, Brian Burg and Jan Vitek. [pdf]
An Analysis of the Dynamic Behavior of JavaScript Programs
PLDI 2010. Gregor Richards, Sylvain Lebresne, Brian Burg and Jan Vitek. [pdf]
Thorn — Robust, Concurrent, Extensible Scripting on the JVM OOPSLA 2009. Tobias Wrigstad, Johan Östlund, Gregor Richards, Jan Vitek, Bard Bloom, John Field, Nathaniel Nystrom and Rok Strnisa. [pdf]
Understanding the Dynamics of JavaScript STOP 2009. Sylvain Lebresne, Gregor Richards, Johan Östlund, Tobias Wrigstad and Jan Vitek.
Code
At my heart I'm a coder. When I learn something new from research, the
itch to actually code it up is almost unbearable. Here are a few things
I've written that could potentially be useful or interesting to others:
Plof, a programming language in
which the grammar and semantics of the language are defined at runtime,
and changeable at any time during execution.
Fythe, the next
generation of Plof's VM. Nowhere near complete yet, but includes an
in-progress JIT and shares all of the more dynamic features (language
defined at runtime) with Plof.
GGGGC, or Gregor's
General-purpose Generational Garbage Collector. A non-conservative
moving garbage collector that is usable from C (with only a few,
reasonable restrictions). Reasonably performant and great for writing
VMs, e.g. Fythe.
Music
Everybody needs a life outside of research, right? I write music in a
neoromantic style influenced by Borodín, Chopin, and various other
composers who I'm not particularly worthy of comparing myself to. More
information is available on my music
page.
Miscellaneous
At the moment, (slightly) more useful information on me can be found at
my personal homepage, codu.org.
Interested in my hat collection? You can decide which one I'll wear!
