The Hall of Fame: When an A+ Just Isn't Enough
While I teach a lot of excellent students, sometimes there are those who do things that are simply amazing. These students deserve recognition beyond a simple grade. Accordingly, I have created the Hall of Fame. Induction into the Hall of Fame requires doing something so far beyond a normal A+ as to merit special recognition. To date, three students have been inducted into the Hall of Fame:
- Aditya Srinivasan. Aditya did an independent study in which he designed and implemented his own new programming language, Gemini (also an Arxiv paper). This programming langauge gives high level language features to hardware design and compiles into Verilog. Aditya also won the ECE department's Seager Award for this work.
- Joyce Er and Natalia Androsz. Joyce and Natalia added a garbage collector to their compiler in ECE/CS 553. While many students add additional features, none have done anything as ambitious as a garbage collector. Their garbage collector implemented Mark and Sweep without pointer/int tag bits in registers. Instead, they passed information from IR down through register allocation to have the compiler generate a table of bitmasks indicating which registers held live pointers at each call site.