Matthew Parkinson
Principal Researcher at Microsoft
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Parkinson is a Principal Researcher and programming language specialist based in Cambridge with 17 years of experience designing and verifying runtimes and language systems. At Microsoft he has driven low-level runtime and compiler work—contributing to research projects like the Verona language and performance-focused repos such as corefxlab—improving memory allocators, schedulers, and reference-counting infrastructure. His background spans academia and industry, including a PhD from Cambridge and a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship, giving him deep expertise in both theory and practical systems engineering. Colleagues rely on him for solving subtle concurrency and memory-safety problems, and his code contributions show a consistent focus on hard systems problems such as race-condition avoidance and allocator performance.
16 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (19)
c-language10
system-programming10
multithreading10
net10
memory-management10
dotnet10
reference-counting10
asp-net10
dotnet-core10
csharp10
cprogramming-language10
concurrency10
testing9
data-structure9
algorithm9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/verona
Dec 2019 - Oct 2022
Research programming language for concurrent ownership
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:312 reviews, 239 commits, 265 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the core infrastructure of the Verona research programming language. They focused on low-level systems programming, particularly within the runtime environment. Their commits updated the snmalloc memory allocator and made significant changes to the scheduler and its associated data structures, including the SPMCQ. The user also made contributions to the compiler, including the parser, and built-in functions.
ownershipconcurrencylanguage-designprogramming-languageconcurrent
dotnet/corefxlab
Dec 2016 - Mar 2017
This repo is for experimentation and exploring new ideas that may or may not make it into the main corefx repo.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 8 PRs, 56 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily focused on refactoring and improving the reference counting mechanism within the `corefxlab` repository. They implemented a new `ObjectTable` for reference counting, improving its speed and efficiency. Additionally, the user addressed race conditions related to memory access and disposal, enhancing the reliability of the code. They also added tests to identify and prevent race conditions.
corefxexperimentation
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