Ben Titzer
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Titzer is a veteran compiler and virtual machine researcher and engineer who co-founded WebAssembly and led the V8 Wasm runtime team at Google, shaping modern browser bytecode performance and security. With over two decades of experience spanning V8’s TurboFan compiler, the Maxine VM and his Virgil language for constrained devices, he blends deep systems design with practical implementation and testing. He has tackled hard problems like Spectre mitigations in production engines and continues to explore layered runtime architectures that place WebAssembly as a universal substrate. Now a principal researcher at CMU and founder of the WebAssembly Research Center, he focuses on rethinking VM design and new engine prototypes informed by both industry-scale shipping experience and academic rigor. An active open-source contributor, his Virgil repo showcases low-level language and JVM backend work that reflects a long-standing interest in compact, high-performance runtimes.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Purdue UniversityUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Github Skills (11)
garbage-collection10
floating-point10
programming-language10
language-design10
float3210
testing10
compiler9
compiler-compiler9
system-programming8
natives7
webassembly7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
titzer/virgil
Dec 2019 - Jan 2023
A fast and lightweight native programming language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:318 reviews, 931 commits, 296 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the development and testing of the Virgil language. Their work involved adding new test cases for garbage collection, floating-point operations, and integer cast behavior. They also implemented several new features within the JVM backend, including support for floating-point literals, rounding, and first-class float operators. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the testing infrastructure by adding target restrictions to app tests and improving the stacktrace functionality.
garbage-collectionnativesystem-programmingwebassemblycompiler
WebAssembly/benchmarks
Jun 2020 - Nov 2022
Resources for collaborative benchmarking
Contributions:2 reviews, 4 commits, 4 PRs in 2 years 4 months
benchmarkcollaborativebenchmarksbenchmarking
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