Peter Van Roy: Significant Achievements (up to 2007)

• Forth compiler (1980) He wrote in assembly language a high-performance Forth compiler and system for the CDP1802 microprocessor family. As far as he knows, this is the highest-performance Forth on this microprocessor family.

• WAM Prolog compiler (1984) In his M.S. thesis of 1984, "A Prolog Compiler for the PLM", he developed the first published WAM compiler for Prolog (UCB/CSD Technical Report 84/203). The WAM (Warren Abstract Machine), considered as the basic implementation technology for Prolog, was presented by David H. D. Warren in October 1983.

• High-performance Prolog compiler (1990) In his Ph.D. dissertation of 1990, "Can Logic Programming Execute as Fast as Imperative Programming?", he was the first to show that the logic programming language Prolog can be compiled with a run-time efficiency equivalent to that of compiled imperative languages such as C on a significant set of programs. This result was contrary to popular wisdom at the time. To show it he designed and built the Aquarius Prolog compiler, which uses global analysis based on abstract interpretation and a fine-grained instruction set, going beyond the WAM. Aquarius Prolog was released in 1994 with a full set of Quintus-compatible built-in predicates.

• Graphic design (1994) He designed and implemented the commercial Macintosh application FractaSketch over the period 1986-1997. FractaSketch allows to design and colorize complex shapes, using a direct manipulation interface that gives immediate feedback to the designer. The colorization algorithms make it easy to achieve subtle self-similar color graduations. The drawing and colorization algorithms were patented by the author. The program was used by fashion designer Jhane Barnes in 1994 and in the book African Fractals by Ron Eglash in 1999.

• Network-transparent distribution (1996) He designed the distribution model of the Oz programming language in 1996 together with Seif Haridi and Per Brand. This is arguably the first system to show that network transparency can be practical. This result was also contrary to popular wisdom at the time. The model was subsequently implemented in the Mozart Programming System and first released publicly in 1999. It provides network transparency with efficient network communication protocols and fault detection within the language. The design was made possible due to the structure of the Oz language, which cleanly separates stateless, single assignment, and stateful entities, and does not use state by default.

  An important part of this work is the distributed protocol for single assignment variables, which does distributed rational tree unification. The algorithm was published in 1999 with a correctness proof (ACM TOPLAS). It is the first published algorithm for this operation that is both correct and complete.

• Programming textbook (2004) He wrote a comprehensive programming textbook together with Seif Haridi that was published by MIT Press in 2004. Translations exist in Polish, French, Spanish, and Japanese. The 929-page book, "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming", covers all major programming paradigms in a unified framework. Some of the book's notable features are its broad and deep coverage of concurrent programming and data abstraction, its practicality (all examples run on the Mozart Programming System), and its formal semantics (a complete and simple semantics that covers all paradigms). A typical review comment is "Wonderful book, very insightful, strangely easy to read". The book was made possible by research done in the context of the Oz programming language.

• Self management in software design (2006) Since 2006 he is coordinating the SELFMAN project on self management of large-scale distributed systems. The only way to overcome the fragility and complexity of software is to make systems self managing.