ReLooper

The first major comment I have on this tool is that I am confused as to why this is a separate tool from the one in the previous paper. Both are heavily focused on the refactoring of your program for enhanced parallelization with the first focusing on recursive functions and this paper focusing on array operations. Both tools seem to be very helpful on their own, and both do show a marked improvement in performance on a system, and both use the ForkJoinTask framework as their basis so it seems that a melding of the two projects into a single refactoring tool would be a grand idea to push performance even higher. I would love to see your group crunch the numbers on the combined performance of the two tools presented so far.

Another issue is the choice of hosts. While a site specifically aimed at refactoring is a logical place to put this tool I am afraid that the tool (and the tool presented previously) are not going to get the exposure they need. As we've discussed in class parallelization is not going to go away and companies and individuals are all going to be looking for the tools to help them get this done in a cost-effective way. So there is already and will be an increasing demand for these tools. And the chioce of working directly inside the Eclipse environment is a great one since that is a widespread IDE. But why not host this inside Eclipse's own addon network? A tool like this needs exposure to get the use it should have, and tucked away in a site away from the first place all developers will look for their addons is not the best approach.

Finally, the fact that the two tools were separated makes perfect sense in the world of academia. Afterall, part of the goal there is to publish as much as possible. In a perfect world the author team or a group closely associated with them would be bundling these advances into a single master tool suite for automated parallelization refactoring. Perhaps a corporate partnership or an appeal to the Open Source community to assist in packaging and refining of the tool itself. I am afraid that by placing the tool in an out-of-the-way location and making multiple publishings on what could easily be the same tool will lead to the death of the project. If after all these papers have been produced the authors move on to new refactoring paths or other areas of interest then this will whither on the vine and programmers will not only be denied a handy tool to make their development easier it will also force at least one other group (though most likely more) to reinvent the wheel. And isn't one of the big things in Software Engineering to build your modules for continued reuse, improvement, and maintenance with an understanding that it will probably not (with any success) be only you working on it in the future?