Emery Berger
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emeryberger.bsky.social
Emery Berger
@emeryberger.bsky.social
2K followers 3.3K following 31 posts
Professor, Computer Science, UMass; Amazon Scholar. I work on programming languages & systems, among other things. http://PLASMA-UMass.org, http://github.com/plasma-umass, http://CSrankings.org, http://github.com/emeryberger. ACM Fellow.
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emeryberger.bsky.social
#NoKings #Amherst #Massachusetts “Fascism for Dummies”
Sign seen at No Kings rally in Amherst, Mass. - “Fascism for Dummies” For all the confused, misinformed, brainwashed, fascism-loving Trump supporters... FASCISM FOR DUMMIES Fa (fascist) <picture of Trump as Hitler> Anti-Fa (Anti-Fascist) <picture of Marines raising flag at Iwo Jima> Over 400,000 American Antifas gave their lives in defense of Democracy during WWII. Don't let their sacrifices be in vain!
October 18, 2025 at 8:14 PM
emeryberger.bsky.social
Even the Tusken Raiders have had enough! (#NoKings Amherst Mass.)
Two protesters dressed as Tusken Raiders from Star Wars holding anti-Trump-as-emperor protest signs in downtown Amherst Massachusetts
October 18, 2025 at 8:05 PM
emeryberger.bsky.social
Joint Keynote Address: Accelerating Software Development: The LLM (R)evolution Emery Berger, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amazon Web Services Large language models are achieving state-of-the-art results across a wide variety of domains, eclipsing past work in well-studied areas like auto-completion. I argue that they also presage a "Cambrian explosion"—a wave of radically new AI-powered software development tools that will make all our lives easier. I propose a paradigm for how we can best rethink existing tools to leverage a combination of LLMs and PL technologies like static and dynamic analysis. This approach promises to evolve our software tools far beyond their current capacities, including profilers that suggest optimizations, debuggers that identify and propose fixes using real-world knowledge, coverage analyzers that synthesize new tests, compilers that propose fixes for compile-time errors, and data analysis frameworks that analyze your data.
September 23, 2025 at 3:20 PM
emeryberger.bsky.social
Happy PLDI Reviewing to those who celebrate! In the spirit of the season, "enjoy" this, uh, poem I wrote for PLDI 2016 - "The Twelve Days of Reviewing PLDI Papers." I stopped with five, but I asked ChatGPT for more suggestions, and got this Grinchy gift: "Twelve Authors Weeping"!
On the First Day of Christmas My Program Chair Gave to Me A Paper On Abstract Syntax Trees On the Second Day of Christmas My Program Chair Gave to Me Two POPL Rejects And A Paper on Abstract Syntax Trees On the Third Day of Christmas My Program Chair Gave to Me Three French Coqs Two POPL Rejects And A Paper on Abstract Syntax Trees On the Fourth Day of Christmas My Program Chair Gave to Me Four Calling Graphs Three French Coqs Two POPL Rejects And A Paper on Abstract Syntax Trees On the Fifth Day of Christmas My Program Chair Gave to Me FIVE STRONG REJECTS! Four Calling Graphs Three French Coqs Two POPL Rejects And A Paper on Abstract Syntax Trees
December 26, 2024 at 12:06 AM
emeryberger.bsky.social
It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages
arxiv.org/abs/2410.05460 @nicovank.bsky.social
It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages, by Nicolas van Kempen, Hyuk-Je Kwon, Dung Tuan Nguyen, and Emery Berger, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst "It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages" Nicolas van Kempen, Hyuk-Je Kwon, Dung Tuan Nguyen, Emery D. Berger Does the choice of programming language affect energy consumption? Previous highly visible studies have established associations between certain programming languages and energy consumption. A causal misinterpretation of this work has led academics and industry leaders to use or support certain languages based on their claimed impact on energy consumption. This paper tackles this causal question directly. It first corrects and improves the measurement methodology used by prior work. It then develops a detailed causal model capturing the complex relationship between programming language choice and energy consumption. This model identifies and incorporates several critical but previously overlooked factors that affect energy usage. These factors, such as distinguishing programming languages from their implementations, the impact of the application implementations themselves, the number of active cores, and memory activity, can significantly skew energy consumption measurements if not accounted for. We show -- via empirical experiments, improved methodology, and careful examination of anomalies -- that when these factors are controlled for, notable discrepancies in prior work vanish. Our analysis suggests that the choice of programming language implementation has no significant impact on energy consumption beyond execution time.
December 11, 2024 at 3:30 PM
emeryberger.bsky.social
The performance impact, at worst, is staggering. Here's a particularly bad case where MonkeyType runs ~1000x slower than RightTyper...because MonkeyType visits every element of every argument on every function invocation.
% time python3.12 -m righttyper test-overhead.py python3.12 -m righttyper test-overhead.py 0.28s user 0.04s system 94% cpu 0.341 total % time python3.12 -m monkeytype run test-overhead.py python3.12 -m monkeytype run test-overhead.py 324.86s user 4.61s system 98% cpu 5:35.20 total def foo(x, ind): return x[ind] q = list(range(1_000_000)) for i in range(1000): foo(q, 0)
November 28, 2024 at 1:53 AM
emeryberger.bsky.social
Listening to the legendary inventor of mixins (the ice cream inclusions but also by one degree of indirection, the PL concept!) and the entire gourmet ice cream industry), Steve Herrell
September 25, 2023 at 5:47 PM
emeryberger.bsky.social
Now available in the Visual Studio Marketplace: the Scalene VS Code Extension! Now you can profile your Python code from the comfort of your IDE! (Note: you need to install the latest version of VS Code and Scalene.) marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...
Young man saying "You got your VS Code on my Scalene" and young woman responding "You got your Scalene on my VS Code". (Overlayed on screenshot of 80's era Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial) Scalene on the VS Code Marketplace
September 20, 2023 at 9:31 PM