Julian Tibble read Computer Science at Worcester College, Oxford and received his BA in 2005. During the summer between his second and third year of undergraduate studies, he was introduced to the AspectBench Compiler project - an ambitious venture to build an optimising extensible compiler for AspectJ. His third-year project was to test and improve the extensibility mechanisms of the compiler through the development of some small language extensions. These extensions still act as a guide to abc-extenders today.
Julian then began studying for a D.Phil. under the supervision of Professor Oege de Moor, and is currently researching Trace Monitoring systems. Trace Monitors allow programmers to specify a temporal pattern of actions that a program may take, and have that program automatically instrumented to detect any matches to that pattern; this is particularly useful for runtime verification - that is, the dynamic detection of bugs in a program. His research is focussed on improving the efficiency of the instrumentation synthesized from trace-monitor patterns. Julian co-implemented the tracematch system, an optimised trace monitoring implementation, which is now distributed as part of abc.
