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Christophe de Dinechin (born in 1969) is a French programmer with notable system software contributions.
Education and Early Professional Career
editDe Dinechin studied at l'École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris. Thereafter, he developed Alpha Waves, a 3D computer game published by Infogrames in 1990.
In the early-to-mid 1990s, Christophe de Dinechin joined Hewlett-Packard's instrumentation division (in Lyon, France), where he developed software for automotive testing, including the underlying operating system for the instrumentation hardware.
Work on Programming Languages
editWhile working for Hewlett-Packard in Lyon, de Dinechin developed a programming language in his spare time. The language, called LX (for “Language Expérimentale”, was influenced by Ada (in particular, regarding syntax), but included various innovations such as pattern-based operator overloading.
In 1997, while visiting colleagues in Cupertino, de Dinechin stopped by the company's California Language Lab (CLL) to discuss his LX project. On that occasion he met David Vandevoorde who at the time was the technical lead for HP's aC++ compiler. Vandevoorde also had a personal programming language project (called Xroma and strongly emphasizing metaprogramming) and the two became friends. Soon thereafter, the aC++ project hired de Dinechin who moved to Sunnyvale for his new position in the C++ compiler team. De Dinechin's best-known work during this phase of his career is his contribution[1] to the design of Hewlett-Packard's scheme for exception handling in its IA-64 ABI. This scheme was later adopted by a consortium of Unix-like operating system providers for the IA-64 architecture for an industry-standard C++ ABI. That ABI in turn was adopted for the C++ compiler in the GNU Compiler Collection.
In 1998, de Dinechin and Vandevoorde decided to join their two programming languages (LX and Xroma) on a common metaprogramming platform. During that time, de Dinechin developed the idea of concept programming (influenced in part by Charles Simonyi's writings about intentional programming). The LX/Xroma project was soon abandoned when Vandevoorde left Hewlett-Packard to work for the Edison Design Group (EDG). De Dinechin continued work on his side of the project which he christened Mozart: A framework for cooperating development tools, including its Java front end Moka [2]. Later he changed the the focus of his work to the XL programming language[3], which incorporates ideas from all aforementioned projects in support of concept programming.
Work on Virtual Machines
editIn 2000, Christophe de Dinechin initiated efforts to virtualize Itanium processors. This quickly caused him to leave the C++ compiler group at Hewlett-Packard and start a new project in the same company: HP Integrity Virtual Machines[4]. He has been the project's software architect since then.
Personal Life
editChristophe de Dinechin is married to Christine de Dinechin, and lives with their three sons and one daughter in Valbonne in south-eastern France.
References
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