vidarh's Journal: Why is all the cool tech ignored?

Over the weekend I've been fooling around with Protocol Extension. I first came across it in '95 or '96 after getting an interest in all the cool stuff going on at department of computer science at ETH Zürich thanks to the Amiga.

You might ask what the Amiga has to do with ETH. The answer is that in '94, after Commodore went bust, there were a lot of discussions in comp.sys.amiga.misc on Usenet about how to save the community, and ways to update the OS that at the time started looking dated (no virtual memory as standard, no memory protection as standard etc.). One of the things that came up was long term migrating to new CPUs, such as Apple did with the Mac. A guy called Edward Blevins posted this message (I love you Google Groups), as part of a HUGE discussion about what the new Amiga OS should look like.

The message points to a concept called Semantic Dictionary Encoding, introduced by Dr. Michael Franz in his doctoral dissertation at ETH. It's a method for encoding a semantic parse tree of an application in a hardware neutral form, and generate the final code at load time.

In a way it's JIT compilation as found in todays Java VMs, but instead of translating from bytecode to native machine code, Semantic Dictionary Encoding is based around translating directly from a simplified parse tree - you reduce the parse tree to a small subset of operators and data types, and optimize as much as you can, then you encode it in a way that at the same time compresses the file. When you load it, you do the final code generation step.

I loved the concept: You can instantly move binaries between systems with different CPUs. Code generators can be tuned to specific hardware combinations or specific CPUs instead of having to generate code for the lowest common denominator. Code generators can take command line arguments into consideration when generating code, allowing further optimizations. Generation can be done based on previous profiling data for YOUR system, etc.

This leads us back to protocol extension. Protocol extension is a way of extending class hierarchies at runtime. I read the report because I was impressed with Dr. Franz work on SDE. I implemented a C based prototype back in '96. I loved it, but didn't have time to go much further with it.

Same thing with SDE. I had a prototype Pascal compiler (because writing a Pascal compiler for basic Pascal is dirt easy) that generated SDE, and a dummy code generator for something pretty close to 68000 machine code. But I didn't have time to look closer at it.

Now, these are two examples of incredibly cool tech I've run into, that to this day is practically unknown in the tech world outside those of us geeky enough to read doctoral dissertations and technical reports from ETH...

Why is it that so few geeks seem to follow whats happening in the universities? Schools like ETH, and numerous universities around the world are spewing out great computer science work that you'd think open source developers would be jumping at instantly, but instead many of these technologies languish for years without anyone spending time on it. In SDE's case, Dr. Franz is still pursuing it to my knowledge, but seems to get little interest for it from people trying to reimplement his tech.

I could pull out dozens of examples of other great concepts that are also being ignored.

Why? Isn't people aware of the technologies? Or am I the only one who find them cool? Did they come at the wrong time?

I'd love to find out.

Ah well, as soon as I have time I'll start looking at protocol extension and SDE again... Hopefully it will be before I'm retired.

Vidar