Dipl.-Ing. Christoph Pichler, BSc. (he/him) Senior Lecturer Address: Altenberger Straße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria Building: Computer Science Building (S3) Room: 210 Phone: + 43-732-2468-4349 Fax: + 43-732-2468-4345 Email: christoph.pichler@jku.at

• Sept. 2026 − current: Senior Lecturer at Institute for System Software (JKU)
• Sept. 2022 − Sept. 2026: PhD Student at Institute for System Software (JKU)
• Aug. 2019 − April 2022: Master's Programme Computer Science (JKU)
  Aug. 2019 − Feb. 2020: Semester abroad at Technische Universiteit Delft (NL) via Erasmus
• Oct. 2016 − Aug. 2019: Bachelor's Programme Computer Science (JKU)

Research

Research Interests

• Compilers and Interpreters
• Intermediate Representations
• Native and Managed Execution
• Virtual Machines

Projects

• Sulong (=GraalVM LLVM Runtime), research coorporation with Oracle Labs
  • 2019: Debugging support: evaluation of (source level, i.e. C/C++) watch expressions (released in GraalVM 20)
  • 2020 – 2021: Truffle Interoperability between C++ and other Truffle languages (released in GraalVM 21.2)
  • 2021 – 2022: Executing Swift on GraalVM via LLVM/Sulong (finished, not released yet)
  • 2022 – 2024: Interoperability between execution modes – combining Sulong with Native Execution
  
  
• GraalVM Native Image (Ahead-of-Time Compilation of Java Byte Code), research coorporation with Oracle Labs
  • 2025 – 2026: Interoperability between execution modes – combining GraalVM Native Image with Interpretation of Java Byte Code

Presentations

• EuroLLVM 2022: [Video, Slides]
  Extending Sulong (an LLVM bitcode runtime) for cross-language interoperability between C++/Swift and Java, JavaScript or Python
  Student Talk, 2022 European LLVM Developers' Meeting (EuroLLVM 2022), May 10-11, 2022, London, United Kingdom
• CGO 2023: [Extended Abstract, Poster]
  Interoperability between Execution Modes on GraalVM
  Student Research Competition, Int. Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO'23), Feb.25-Mar.1, 2023, Montreal, Canada
• EuroLLVM 2024: [Poster]
  Combining Execution Modes of LLVM Bitcode on GraalVM
  2024 European LLVM Developers' Meeting (EuroLLVM 2024), April 10-11, 2024, Vienna, Austria

Publications

• Christoph Pichler, Bernhard Urban-Forster, Paley Li, Roland Schatz, Stefan Marr:
  To Compile or Not To Compile: Evaluating Static Heuristics to Reduce Binary Size of Hybrid Execution Systems
  MPLR 2026, June 30, 2026, Brussels, Belgium
  
• Christoph Pichler, Bernhard Urban-Forster, Paley Li, Roland Schatz, Hanspeter Mössenböck:
  Fast and Compact: Reducing Size of AOT-Compiled Java Code Without Sacrificing Performance
  MPLR 2025, October 14, 2025, Singapore [Video of Presentation]
  
• Christoph Pichler, Paley Li, Roland Schatz, Hanspeter Mössenböck:
  On Automating Hybrid Execution of Ahead-of-Time and Just-in-Time Compiled Code
  VMIL 2024, October 20, 2024, Pasadena, CA, USA [Video of Presentation]
  
• Christoph Pichler, Paley Li, Roland Schatz, Hanspeter Mössenböck:
  Hybrid Execution: Combining Ahead-of-Time and Just-in-Time Compilation
  VMIL 2023, October 23, 2023, Cascais, Portugal [Video of Presentation]
  
• Thomas Grurl, Christoph Pichler, Jürgen Fuß, Robert Wille:
  Automatic Implementation and Evaluation of Error-Correcting Codes for Quantum Computing: An Open-Source Framework for Quantum Error Correction
  VLSID 2023, Hyderabad, India
  Received Best Student Paper Award

Teaching

Courses

• Übung zu Softwareentwicklung 1: 2023W, 2024W, 2025W, 2026W (lessions held as substitute: 2022W, 2023S)
• Tutorium zu Softwareentwicklung 1: 2021W, 2022W, 2023W, 2026W
• Praktikum aus Softwareentwicklung 2: 2023S, 2024S, 2025S, 2026S
• Compilerbau: 2026W

Supervised Theses

• Current supervisions (i.e. theses in progress) can be found here.
• Jonathan Hocheneder, 2026: Designing a Music-based Programming Language
• Tobias Müller, 2025: Static Compiler Optimizations for the MicroJava Compiler
• Florian Punz, 2025: MicroJava Extension for Visual Studio Code
• Halil Bahar, 2025: Extending Sulong's Debugging Expression Evaluation for C++ Expressions
• Paul Lehner, 2024: Abstract Syntax Trees for MicroJava

Workshops

• Spieleentwicklung mit Scratch (Zielgruppe Schulklassen)