What’s interesting to me about Prof Berger’s work is that while many of his ideas are seemingly powerful and should be very impactful, it’s underutilized in practice. I think that’s because he’s failed to figure out how to really make it easy to use and productized. For example, Coz should be the definitive tool and mechanism people use to do performance analysis. However because it’s so hard to use and fails in various ways and is barely maintained if at all it ends up seeing limited use.
It’s a shame. The real world of development would be significantly richer if these ideas had better funding and dedicated long term development.
One of the researchers behind either rump kernels or unikernels talked to us here about making it usable. He said he was discouraged by his advisors from doing that. He could write more papers instead.
The reason they think that was is it's quantity over quality in much of academia, esp citation scores and funding for new research. Some groups seem to have their researchers use some of their time to build useful software. Most isn't production quality or maintained because they're basically paid not to do that. It's why many don't join academic research and others supported funding cuts or reform.
> DTHREADS works by exploding multithreaded applications into multiple processes, with private, copy-on-write mappings to shared memory... Experimental results show that DTHREADS substantially outperforms a state-of-the-art deterministic runtime system, and for a majority of the benchmarks evaluated here, matches and occasionally exceeds the performance of pthreads.
Note that this wouldn't have been useful for Factorio, because Factorio deals with the harder problem of needing deterministic results with varying amount of parallelism, whereas from what I understand Dthread only give the same results if you run the program with the same number of "threads".
It’s a shame. The real world of development would be significantly richer if these ideas had better funding and dedicated long term development.