On November 16, we will have a guest lecture from Thierry Lavoie at Oracle.

Random Encounters With Wild Compilers

The Journal of a Decade of (Mis)adventures with Compilers and Programming Languages

Abstract

Look around you: there are compilers everywhere. Every day, you are using a dozen of them under different guise. You may call them game engines, web browsers, web servers, bug finders, or orchestras, they are all compilers. And where there is a compiler, there is a programming language. Thus, compiler and programming language experts have countless ways of applying their skills, from the most obvious problems, to the most farfetched. So, what could go wrong? Aplenty! In this talk, I will chronicle the last decade of my experience working with compilers and programming languages in multiple domains, succeeding at building and launching products, failing at building and launching products, and musing on what I learned and what I wished I had learned.

Bio

Thierry Lavoie is the Director of Application Security Tools Development, responsible to drive the vision behind SAST and SCA tools designed at Oracle. Prior to joining Oracle, he had worked the better part of a decade at Coverity/Synopsys where his career culminated in heading their static analysis group and creating a new static analysis product, Sigma. He holds a PhD in static analysis from the University of Montreal Engineering School and has published 15 academic papers, 2 theses, obtained or is pending obtention of 4 patents, given a dozen of invited talks, regularly serves as a reviewer for academic journals and conferences, and is on the steering committee of the State of The Art of Static Analysis/SOAP Workshop. He was a lecturer at the University of Montreal for 7 years on data structures, compilers, and computer graphics. As a developer, Thierry enjoys working on problems related to program correctness, formal logic, system programming, emulation, and optimization. In his free time, he is a runner and a semi-professional clarinet player.