Tamás Kozsik

Professor at Eötvös Loránd University

Tamás is associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary), where he is vice dean for academic affairs at the Faculty of Informatics. He teaches programming paradigms and languages (Ada, Eiffel, Erlang, Haskell, Java, Scala) and tries to hide which his favourite language is. During the nights, he does research in refactoring and parallel programming.

Free the Conqueror! (Refactoring divide-and-conquer functions)

Functions implementing divide-and-conquer algorithms are good candidates for parallelization. Their identifying property is that such a function divides its input into “smaller” chunks, calls itself recursively on these smaller chunks, and combines the outputs into one. Last year I gave a talk on how such functions can be identified by static source code analysis. This year I explain how divide-and-conquer functions can be transformed with a refactoring tool into a parallel equivalent. Tool-based refactoring is a safe process: we apply a sequence of semantics preserving transformations, so we do not need to worry about breaking the code. I present a number of useful transformations, implemented (or currently being implemented) in RefactorErl, a refactoring tool for Erlang.

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