From Mr. to Dr. Di Giacomo

Last week, one of Hoppinger’s architects has achieved a major milestone in his life. After four years of hard work, Francesco Di Giacomo has successfully defended his PhD thesis at Tilburg University, thereby earning the title of Doctor of Philosophy.

His work focuses on high-performance meta-compilers, which are pieces of software which accept as input a generic description of a programming language (the syntactic elements, the composition rules, and how to turn them into code that the machine can actually run!) and produce as output the compiler for the language itself.

An insight of the results of his case study:

The result shows an optimization in the meta-compiler, using a language abstraction built upon the mathematical concept of “Functors”, that boosts the performance of the generated code vs the same code generated with an unoptimized version.

The work is very abstract, but it has some amazing industrial applications. One immediate application of Francesco’s work is with the OData connector that he is building at Hoppinger. He is building a compiler that translates, on the fly, the query specification that came as input via an OData endpoint into a single, humongous SQL query that can be run at a very high performance.

We are incredibly proud of having been a part of this wonderful path, and even more, we are really excited to be at the forefront of innovation, integrating scientific research directly into our daily technical operations to raise the bar of quality higher and higher.