Well, I have not done too well with my goal of reading a research paper a day on the train (actually my initial goal was two papers, but seeing as how I’ve failed so spectacularly, I’ve dialed it back some). However, I’ve decided to give it another go. I’ve bought a printer now so I can print papers out (double-sided, no less!) at home (I had initially planned to buy an iPad or something, but a decent printer is only $100, and paper is still nicer to read and write notes on…you do the math). As additional motivation, I’m working again on the paper on Rust’s new borrowed pointers and so I have to catch up on a lot of related work.

I’ve been making a point of reading academic papers on the train as I ride home. It’s so easy to get behind with the sheer quantity of work that is being produced. Anyway, it occurred to me that I ought to try and summarize the papers I read on this blog so that I can I remember my reactions to them.

I’ll start with “Permission Regions for Race-Free Parallelism”, by Westbrook, Zhao, Budimilic, and Sarkar. The basic idea builds off of Habanero Java, which is a kind of fork of the X10 language that Sarkar and his group work on. The basic idea of the paper is to add a language construct permit which looks like: