ReLooper

Although I read this whole paper, I can’t find too much to say about it that wasn’t already covered in the blogs and discussion about Concurrencer. This is because I see a lot of similarity between what ReLooper does and how Concurrencer will convert an algorithm to use the Fork-Join framework automatically for you. What ReLooper does actually seems like an easier and more naïve change that what Concurrencer does with the fork-join framework, so I’m surprised that Relooper gets its own paper and Eclipse plug-in, while Concurrencer does the fork-join optimization as only one of three of its features.

I would be happy with a compiler making these optimizations for me automatically if there were an iron-clad guarantee that no potential problems could be introduced. However, I think that is a hard guarantee to make and would prefer to either have a tool like Relooper imperatively define what I’d like to happen, but I would prefer an option to tell the compiler declaratively, via an attribute in .NET for example (an annotation in Java?), that the marked code is safe to be automatically parallelized.