Basile STARYNKEVITCH

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Who am I?

• Born in august 1959.
• Married and father of 4 children (and already grand-father)
• snail mail: 8, rue de la Faïencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France
• I am now again (since september 15th 2004) at CEA LIST/DILS as a research engineer. (working on embedded optimising compiler, static analysis, ...). I don't have any web page at my work because medium management disallow any professional web pages. Frama-C is developped by colleagues. My main work is on GCC notably its MELT branch (funded by various projects like GlobalGCC or OpenGPU). MELT provides a higher-level language to develop GCC extensions and tailor it to your own needs.
• From september 15th 2003 to september 14th 2004 I worked (for a full year as ingénieur spécialiste issu de l'industrie) as a research engineer at INRIA in the Cristal team. My work was on adding orthogonal persistence to Ocaml and on Just in Time translation of the bytecode. Here is my page at INRIA
• Formerly research engineer (computer scientist) at Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, working in the Software and Architecture Service (SLA) in the Direction of Technological Research (DRT) on static analysis of code (and scripts) and the Web.
• Education: graduated from École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (1980, section A₁ = math) and doctor (PhD) of l'Université Paris 6 (1990) in computer science.

Computer related interests

I am interested by compiler and programming languages. I've probably inherited this interest from my late father Dimitri (inventor of the PAF programming language on CAB500, similar to Basic in 1958).

I find very interesting knowledge based systems and reflexive systems. Metaprogramming is pertinent, and under-used. I think that computer systems should be given a lot of declarative knowledge (including metaknowledge for using them). Symbolic processing is interesting, but numerical processing is boring to me. I find exciting J.Pitrat's Maciste/Caia system and Tunes. I recommend J.Pitrat's latest book on Artificial Beings

I am a long-time user of opensource or free software. I am using Linux since the 0.99.15 kernel (1993?). I believe free software will have even more and more success, since the human species is unable to manage successfully software development otherwise. (management basically cannot exist). Only the organic way of collectively develop free software is able to produce more and more complex or important software.

I am interested by programming languages, and of course I know C, Java, C++ (I hate it - it is today's Cobol and is always unappropriate), Scheme, CommonLisp, Smalltalk. I love Ocaml. Scripting languages are interesting (except Tcl - Ousterhout made the mistake of hypothesing that scripts remain tiny), such as Ruby (and Ocaml).

Markup languages XML (eg DocBook) and text formatting such as Lout and LaTeX are appropriate to produce documents. I do not know Word (and you need a big lot of time to learn it, particularily the dirty tricks to overcome its numerous bugs).

Meta-programming, i.e. automatic and dynamic generation of programs (from a higher level representation) is an interesting (but underused) approach for many problems.

Memory management should be done thru a garbage collector. Dealing explicitly with memory deallocation (like in C and C++) is a lost of time for both the coder and the machine. When I have to code in C a non trivial program, I either use H.Boehm's conservative GC or code my own GC like in Qish.

At work, I significantly contributed to initiate the GlobalGCC (ITEA) and OpenGPU projects, to fund my work on GCC.

Professionally, I was the initiator of the POESIA (Public Opensource Environment for a Safer Internet Access) IAP-2117 european project, which started in january 2002 (till january 2004) with partial funding from the European Commission thru the Safer Internet Action Plan ( filtering software). See poesia-filter.org for details.

Recent Publications

Here are some recent papers ot slides:

• (march 2010) slides in French sur les greffons de GCC (GCC plugins) (with Zbigniew Chamski), Paris, Solutions Linux
• (july 2007) GCC summit paper
• (september 2004) OCamljit - a faster Just-In-Time Ocaml implementation accepted to MetaOcaml 2004 workshop, Vancouver, 11 pages (PostScript).
• (january 2003, in French) Basile Starynkévitch et Mohamed Daoudi: Architecture du système Poesia de filtrage de contenu Internet (architecture of the Poesia system for Internet content filtering) PDF file, in CORESA 2003 (Lyon)
• (september 2001, in French) Basile Starynkévitch: un regard extérieur sur le système Maciste de Jacques Pitrat, in Colloque Métaconnaissance de Berder (PDF file) [a short and incomplete review of J.Pitrat's reflexive metaknowledge based system Maciste]
• (spring? 2001 - gzipped PostScript) A Simple Abstract Interpreter for Threat Detection and Test Case Generation , Dominique Guilbaud, Eric Goubault, Anne Pacalet, Basile Starynkévitch and Franck Védrine presented at WAPATV'01 (associated with ICSE'01, Toronto) [a co-authored paper on a static code analyzer, using abstract interpretation techniques]

Software contributions

• The MELT branch of GCC (and regular contributions to GCC)
• A small utility (GPL licensed) to dump or load GDBM files in textual format is gdbmtext.c here
• The execicar.c program runs and monitors processes thru a textual protocol
• I wrote manydl.c to experiment about dlopen (dynamic loading of libraries), and found that on my Linux/Debian/Sid/x86 box (AMD XP2000 1.66GHz 512Mb RAM) one can generate thirty thousand (yes 30000) C sources (erach with a randomly generated function) and shared objects and dlopen all of them together. You can compile it with gcc -rdynamic -O manydl.c -ldl -o manydl and run the executable ./manydl 900 200 to generate 900 files named genf_*.c of about 200 lines each, compile them, and dynamically load them. You can even try ./manydl 30000 1000 as I did. See the source code for details. In practice, you can do many -thousands- of calls to dlopen.
• OcamlJitRun (developped at INRIA) has its own page; it is a Just in Time translator of Ocaml bytecode into machine code, and may run your unmodified Ocaml bytecode about twice as faster as the usual ocamlrun interpreter.
• Persil (developped at INRIA) is a persistent library for Ocaml
• Qish contains a runtime system, including a copying generational garbage collector usable in CThis is opensource free software, under GPL license, developped on Linux/x86. Here is a documentation of Qish (in english) and its PDF version and its PostScript version. The latest version of Qish is always referred as a Freshmeat project and here. You can subscribe to annoucements on Freshmeat.
• Guis is a small widget server (for gtk2) to avoid linking in gtk in your application.. This is opensource free software, under GPL license, developped on Linux/x86. Here is a documentation of Guis (in english) and its PostScript version. The latest version of guis is always referred as a Freshmeat project and here. You can subscribe to annoucements on Freshmeat.
• I worked and initiated on POESIA an opensource internet content filter. Ocaml developers could also use (for tracing or logging) the pa_trace.ml file for the camlp4 preprocessor, from PoesiaMonIcap. See also there the README.trace file.

Comparative timing of GCC compilations on two desktops.

the /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration file for Xorg (X11R7) with a twin-headed Geforce 7600 GT with NVIDIA proprietary driver and two Samsung 17 inches LCD screens (using a twinview screen).(I don't recommend using this, because of brittle proprietary drivers)

Here is a photo of me taken on september 28th 2002: .