Generality & Programmability are at Odds with

Today’s languages, systems, and architectures include considerable support for generality and programmability. Systems are built to enable simple implementation of a broad class of programs, and to provide an acceptable level of performance and efficiency. The profusion of high-level languages, runtime and system support for tasks like garbage collection and virtualization, and architectural mechanisms like virtual memory speak to the importance placed by system designers on supporting programmability for a broad class of programs. While systems go to these great lengths for generality and programmability, efficiency is also a key design requirement because the amount of time, space, and energy a computation re-quires ultimately determines its cost. Unfortunately, system support for generality is frequently at odds with the need for high perfor-mance and efficiency. Mechanisms and abstractions built to provide generality and programmability come at a cost in efficiency an