Review of ReLooper

This paper describes the ways in which an eclipse based tool called as ReLooper helps programmers help parallelize their programs. It makes use of the ParallelArray data structure for arrays. This paper gives an emphasis on determining when parallelizing a program would be unsafe (thread-unsafe). A good deal of user interactivity is, I think, one of the important features of ReLooper. The study evaluation for determining whether the refactored programs have conflicting memory access is useful. From the research evaluation it seems clear that reporting all possible race conditions (or not having false negatives) is one among the several benefits of this work. There also seems to be a good deal of speedup achieved (for both 1 and 2-core) as compared to the original code. The methodology of evaluation, by no means comprehensive, look sufficient to show the inherent advantages of using ReLooper. I tend to disagree with some of the evaluation results on the time taken (especially for the machine learning algorithms). It is hard to compare in the absence of other techniques (for comparison purposes). However with all the inherent advantages of ReLooper, I do not see a lot of practical applications for this as many real-life programs are much more complicated, and it remains to be seen how would research progress from this stage to the point where many different types of code could be refactored in a similar manner.