David Bacon is an American

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

Career

Bacon began working as a programmer at age 16 and worked for a startup during his senior year of high school. At

Columbia College, Columbia University Columbia College is the oldest undergraduate college of Columbia University, a private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan, it is the oldest instit ...

, he worked first with

David E. Shaw David Elliot Shaw (born March 29, 1951) is an American billionaire scientist and former hedge fund manager. He founded D. E. Shaw & Co., a hedge fund company which was once described by ''Fortune'' magazine as "the most intriguing and mysteriou ...

on the NON-VON supercomputer, and then on network algorithms and simulation with Yechiam Yemini, creating the NEST Network Simulator, which served as the basis for a number of other network simulators including Cornell's REAL and thence LBL's ns simulator.

IBM Research

Bacon spent a large portion of his career at IBM's

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. Its main laboratory is in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City. It also operates facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Albany, ...

, starting as a programmer in 1985 working on the

Hermes Hermes (; ) is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology considered the herald of the gods. He is also widely considered the protector of human heralds, travelers, thieves, merchants, and orators. He is able to move quic ...

distributed programming language, and eventually becoming a Principal Research Staff Member. He took a sabbatical in 2009 as a visiting professor of computer science at

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...

. Much of his work at IBM focused on

garbage collection Waste collection is a part of the process of waste management. It is the transfer of solid waste from the point of use and disposal to the point of treatment or landfill. Waste collection also includes the curbside collection of recyclable ...

. In 2009 he was inducted as an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

"for contributions to real-time systems and to object-oriented language design and implementation". His work on the Metronome

hard real-time Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constrai ...

tracing garbage collector became the basis for the IBM WebSphere Real Time Java virtual machine, which was used in the software for the Navy's DDG 1000 Destroyer. The original research was subsequently selected for the 2013 Most Influential Paper Award of the

Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages The annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) is an academic conference in the field of computer science, with focus on fundamental principles in the design, definition, analysis, and implementation of prog ...

. His work on garbage collecting cyclic structures in reference counted systems has been used in a number of scripting languages, including

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

. In 2013 he published the first garbage collector implemented completely in hardware, which was selected as an ACM Research Highlight. In addition to garbage collection, his work has focused on the implementation of concurrent and object-oriented languages. His thesis work on Rapid Type Analysis (RTA) has been used in many compilers and analysis frameworks to construct

call graph A call graph (also known as a call multigraph) is a control-flow graph, which represents calling relationships between subroutines in a computer program. Each node represents a procedure and each edge ''(f, g)'' indicates that procedure ''f'' c ...

s for object-oriented languages, including

Soot Soot ( ) is a mass of impure carbon particles resulting from the incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. Soot is considered a hazardous substance with carcinogenic properties. Most broadly, the term includes all the particulate matter produced b ...

and Go. In 2004, his work on high-performance locking for

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

appeared on the list of the 50 most influential

PLDI The Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) conference is an annual computer science conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which focuses on the study of algorithms, programming languages and compiler ...

papers of all time.20 Years of PLDI (1979–1999): A Selection, Kathryn S. McKinley, Editor
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Google

In 2014 he joined

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, where he is now a Principal Engineer, working on the

Spanner A wrench or spanner is a tool used to provide grip and mechanical advantage in applying torque to turn objects—usually rotary fasteners, such as Nut (hardware), nuts and screw, bolts—or keep them from turning. In the United Kingdom, UK, ...

distributed database system. He is responsible for Spanner's

Database engine A database engine (or storage engine) is the underlying software component that a database management system (DBMS) uses to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) data from a database. Most database management systems include their own application ...

References

External links

Author profile on Google scholarList of publications on DBLPList of patents
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bacon, David F. 1963 births Living people 2009 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Hunter College High School alumni Columbia College (New York) alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni American computer scientists American software engineers Programming language researchers Google employees IBM employees Scientists from New York (state) 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists