Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2007.02366

Starfish: A Prototype for Universal Preprocessing and Text-Embedded Programming

Vlado Keselj
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We present a novel concept of universal text preprocessing and text-embedded programming (PTEP). Preprocessing and text-embedded programming has been widely used in programming languages and frameworks in a fragmented and mutually isolated way. The PTEP ideas can be found in the implementation of the \TeX\ typesetting system; they are prominent in PHP and similar web languages, and finally they are used in the Jupyter data science framework. This paper presents this area of research and related work in a more unified framework, and we describe the implemented system Starfish that satisfies the following novel principles of PTEP: universality, update and replace modes, flexiblity, configurability, and transparency. We describe the operating model and design of Starfish, which is an open-source system implementing universal preprocessing and text-embedded programming in Perl. The system is transparent and its design allows direct implementation in other programming languages as well.

Explore related subjects

cs.PLcs.CL

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Vlado Keselj. 2020-07-05. Starfish: A Prototype for Universal Preprocessing and Text-Embedded Programming. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02366

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

On the computational complexity of JavaScript regex matching

Despite widespread use, the complexity of the matching problem for modern regular expressions languages remains unclear. Previous work proved that an idealized regular expression language with backreferences and lookarounds had PSPACE-complete matching. We extend this work to a real-world regex language by proving that JavaScript regex matching with expanded lower-bounded quantifiers is PSPACE-complete. We then generalize the result: we show that PSPACE-hardness survives the removal of negative lookarounds, and that removing all lookarounds leads to an OptP-complete parsing problem. Our core arguments are formalized in Rocq.

cs.PL↗
arXiv2026

Opportunistic ZGC: Leveraging Idle Cores for More Effective Concurrent Garbage Collection

Managed language runtimes often provide concurrent garbage collectors so that latency-critical applications with large working sets can keep running while most collection work proceeds in the background. ZGC is a production-quality, generational, concurrent collector in OpenJDK with sub-millisecond pause times. While ZGC is designed to run concurrently, frequent and excessive collections with ZGC can still slow the mutators due to synchronization costs and interference with shared computing resources. Hence, the ZGC scheduler is conservative by default, and in most cases, will grow the heap toward the maximum allowed before scheduling a collection. While this approach minimizes collection effort, it can be wasteful, or even harmful, if the maximum heap size is not well tuned to the actual working set. We propose Opportunistic ZGC (OppZGC), a feedback-directed ZGC scheduling policy that constrains the heap dynamically and automatically, without per-application tuning. OppZGC identifies periods when CPU cores are underutilized and leverages them for concurrent collection with ZGC. We describe the design and implementation of OppZGC in OpenJDK's HotSpot Java VM and evaluate it with standard and latency-sensitive benchmarks from DaCapo Chopin and SPECjbb. OppZGC limits heap usage when there is CPU capacity sufficient for additional collections, and avoids scheduling extra collections when they would substantially degrade performance. Overall, it reduces maximum heap usage for our DaCapo benchmarks by between 61% and 90%, on average, depending on configuration, with minimal impact on throughput and request latency compared to default ZGC.

cs.PL↗
arXiv2026

From Rocq to Metal: A Pipeline for Formally Verified Microcontroller Firmware

Enforcing invariants in safety-critical firmware is increasingly urgent as generated code becomes widespread, but standard extraction targets for proof assistants require runtimes too large for many embedded devices. We present a pipeline for running formally verified Rocq firmware logic on Cortex-M microcontrollers. The pipeline extracts Gallina to Scheme, compiles it with Encore!, a bare-metal Continuation Passing Style (CPS) bytecode virtual machine, and embeds the result in no_std Rust firmware. We structure applications as pure state-transition functions, so the business logic is proved in Rocq while the event/effect boundary, host callbacks, compiler, and VM remain explicit trusted components. On ST33-class targets with a 50 KB RAM lower bound, Encore! executes Rocq-extracted code end-to-end, stays within the target memory budget on our benchmarks, and validates a transaction-signing application on physical Ledger Flex hardware.

cs.PL↗