David J. Pearce (Blog)

Dynamic Cycle Detection for Lock Ordering

Saturday, December 19th, 2020

Recently, I discovered that an algorithm of mine from a few years back is being used in both TensorFlow and the Abseil C++ library (see here and here). That is of course pretty exciting since they are both widely used libraries!

Automated Testing for Whiley

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020

Recently, the online editor for Whiley was updated with some new features. Actually, the update represents a complete rewrite of the front-end in Whiley. Obviously, I am very excited about that!

Understanding Partial Moves in Rust

Monday, November 30th, 2020

Recently I’ve been digging into Rust and, whilst it’s a great language on many fronts, I do find lots of hidden complexity. One example which doesn’t get much attention is partial moves.

The Semantics of Semantic Versioning?

Thursday, September 24th, 2020

Semantic versioning is a surprisingly interesting topic when you get into it. Recently, myself and a few colleagues (Patrick & Jens) have been giving it some thought (and we even wrote an essay on it)!

Whiley is Ten Years Old!

Tuesday, September 1st, 2020

The first commit recorded in the WhileyCompiler repository on Github is dated June 25th, 2010. That means Whiley has been going for just over ten years already! Wow, time sure does fly.

Verifying leftPad() in Whiley

Monday, April 23rd, 2018

The leftPad(string,int) function simply pads a string up to a given size by inserted spaces at the beginning. For example, leftPad("hello",8) produces " hello". This little function shot to fame in 2016 when a developer pulled all his modules from NPM, of which one provided the leftPad() functionality.

Verifying Bubble Sort in Whiley

Tuesday, December 19th, 2017

Bubble sort is a classic sorting algorithm with lots of well-known issues. It’s been a long time since I thought much about this algorithm. But, it turns out to be an interesting verification example for Whiley, as it has some interesting loop invariants.

On the Internet and Object-Oriented Programming

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

The rise of the internet over the last, say, two decades has been pretty unstoppable (we all know that). But, is it now affecting the prominence of object-oriented programming? I’m going to try and argue in this post that: yes, it is.

Property Syntax in Whiley

Tuesday, March 28th, 2017

Recently, I gave a demo which showed off thew new “Property Syntax” in Whiley. Whilst this is still in the devel branch it will make its way, soon enough, into the next release.

On Memory Management and Rust

Wednesday, February 15th, 2017

Rust is definitely one of the more interesting new programming language I’ve come across recently. Memory management is definitely Rust’s “thing”, and the language wants to have its cake and eat it (so to speak).

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