CS577 PROJECT GUIDELINES

DATES

Apr 27		Initial proposals due
May 4		Final proposal approval required
May 25		Progress report due
June 12		Project delieverables and writeup due

RULES

Each student must do a substantial programming project or 
write a substantial survey paper on a topic relevant to the course.
Students choose their project/topic, with agreement of the instructor.
It is permissible to work in teams of two on a project (but not on
a paper), with a corresponding increase in expectations. 
The project or paper will count as roughly 2/3 of the course grade.
The grade will factor in the difficulty of what you attempt as well
as the quality of your results.

EXAMPLE CODING PROJECTS

There are *only* examples.  The best projects are usually the ones you think 
of yourself. 

o Build an LLVM or WebAssembly backend for a toy language (e.g. Appel's Tiger or miniJava)
o Use the Spoofax DynSem tool to generate an interpreter for some interesting language
o Translate a Java subset to functional IR and implement some simple optimizations
o Implement a new GC algorithm for the Jikes RVM, and compare its performance with
  that of existing collectors on that platform.
o Do a careful performance comparison of code produced by three different JavaScript
  compilers on a suitable benchmark suite.

Don't attempt to do too much! (The suggestions above are already pretty 
optimistic.)  As a general rule, learning to use any existing framework is
very timeconsuming, so you should not plan to do anything very big on top.
If you want to explore a deeper idea, try to use a more toy framework.

Teams of two are allowed on coding projects.

Some possible platforms for coding projects:

o LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine)
o Graal (Oracle's experimental JIT compiler for JVM)
o Truffle (Oracle's framework for efficient interpreters hosted in Java)
o Spoofax (TU Delft language prototyping environment)
o WebAssembly (Native code platform for browsers)
o RPython (framework for efficient interpreters hosted in Python)
o Open JDK
o My Mini-JVM
o Jikes (IBM's research Java-in-Java JIT)
o CompCert certified compiler (written in Coq/OCAML)

EXAMPLE SURVEY PAPERS

Again, these are *only* examples.

o Performance assessment of gradual typing systems.
o Data-race detection mechanisms for parallel code.
o Compiler structuring techniques for heterogeneous cores.
o Machine learning techniques in compilation.
o Techniques for verifying correctness of compiler transformations.

Surveys should cover about six conference or journal papers that "speak to each other."  

No teaming is allowed on survey papers.



INITIAL PROPOSAL CONTENTS

Your initial proposal should be one page.  It should describe the following:

o Project/paper topic.
   This should be described by saying what question your project is going to answer.

   Examples:
      Which commercially available Java JIT produces the fastest-running code? 
      Does garbage collection algorithm XYZ make the Jikes optimizing JVM run
	       faster than existing GC's?
      How can optimizers inline functions even in the presence of dynamically
               loaded code?

o Approach.
   Are you doing experimental comparison, implementation, or a research paper survey? 

o Deliverables.
   What do you plan to hand in?  Just a paper?  Experimental results? Code?

o Materials and tools
   If you're doing an experimental comparison or implementation, what existing
      software and tools will you work with?
   If you're doing a research comparison, list at least 4 key papers you plan
      to include in your literature survey.


Proposals should be submitted by email to me on the due date.  I will
give feedback on them as quickly as possible.  I may encourage you to
narrow your topic, use a different approach, or use different tools.
In rare cases, I may require you to change your topic.  It is a very
good idea to discuss topics with me in advance.

PROGRESS REPORT

A 1-2 page intermediate progress report will be required about three
weeks into the project.  This is intended to help keep projects on
track.

PROJECT WRITEUP

All projects, even those whose primary product is code, must include a
written summary of methods and results.