Alan Hayward
Technical Lead, .NET at Arm
Wilmslow, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Hayward is a Technical Lead for .NET at Arm with 13 years of software engineering experience and a deep background in low-level systems, compiler toolchains, and runtime performance. He leads .NET and OpenJDK platform efforts at Arm, contributing hands-on to AArch64 support in OpenJDK and vectorized, architecture-aware optimizations in the dotnet/runtime (including Base64 SIMD and SVE/Arm64 codegen). His career spans roles in compiler engineering, GDB maintenance, and platform teams at Arm and IBM, giving him rare expertise across VM internals, assemblers, and production storage systems. Based in Wilmslow, UK, he blends technical leadership with sustained open-source impact on critical projects like OpenJDK and the .NET runtime, often focusing on correctness and performance in complex, architecture-specific code paths.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Bachelor of Science (BSc) at The University of ManchesterSt Aelreds
English, German
Github Skills (28)
assembly10
jvm10
system-programming10
computer-architecture10
architecture10
net10
cpu-architecture10
dotnet10
vectorization10
java10
asp-net10
openjdk10
javas10
arch10
microarchitecture10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
openjdk/jdk
Sep 2020 - Feb 2023
JDK main-line development https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:43 reviews, 9 PRs, 110 comments in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the AArch64 architecture support within the OpenJDK project, focusing on low-level system code. Their work involved modifying the HotSpot virtual machine, including changes to the macro assembler, shared runtime, and frame handling. The commits show efforts to correct backtracing on PAC enabled systems and implement branch protection measures. Furthermore, they addressed specific build errors, indicating a focus on ensuring the stability and correctness of the AArch64 port of the JDK.
openjdkjavajvmjdk
dotnet/runtime
Jun 2022 - Nov 2022
.NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:647 reviews, 11 commits, 80 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Alan's contributions primarily focused on optimizing and implementing vectorized versions of base64 encoding and decoding functions within the .NET runtime. They worked on the System.Buffers.Text.Base64 library, specifically developing Vector128 versions of existing functions. Additionally, the user was involved in adding code generation support for Arm64 architectures and also made improvements related to instruction sets used in base64 encoding and decoding, including adding support for SVE instructions, and related fixes to SVE instructions.
dotnetruntimelinuxcsharpxamarin
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