Andreas Gal

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Andreas Gal
Andreas Gal.jpg
Born (1976-05-22) May 22, 1976 (age 46) [1]
Szeged, Hungary [1] [2]
NationalityGerman, American
Alma mater University of California, Irvine
Scientific career
InstitutionsCEO, Silk Labs
Thesis Efficient Bytecode Compilation and Verification in a Virtual Machine
Doctoral advisor Michael Franz
Website andreasgal.com

Andreas Gal is former chief technology officer at Mozilla. He is most notable for his work on several open source projects and Mozilla technologies.

Gal was born in Szeged, Hungary [1] and grew up in Lübeck, Germany. [2] During high school he worked on various open source AX.25 network stacks and designed a routing protocol for ham radio network nodes (INP3 [3] ) that became widely supported by AX.25 network routers. [4] [5] [6]

During his graduate studies at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg he was a codesigner of AspectC++, an aspect-oriented extension of C and C++ languages. [7] He later went on to obtain his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. His thesis introduced the concept of Tracing just-in-time compilation of high-level languages using trace trees. [8]

Gal joined Mozilla in 2008 and built TraceMonkey, the first JavaScript just-in-time compiler [9] in a web browser, only weeks before Google announced Chrome and the V8 JavaScript engine. After his work on TraceMonkey, Gal became the Director of Research at Mozilla. A notable research project he started was PDF.js, a PDF renderer in JavaScript and HTML5, which now replaces the Adobe PDF plug-in in Firefox. [10]

In 2011, Gal co-founded the Boot to Gecko project, which later became Firefox OS. [11]

In 2013, Gal was appointed the Vice President of Mobile Engineering of Mozilla. [12] In April 2014, Gal became the CTO of Mozilla. [13] In June 2015 he left Mozilla, [14] co-founding the Internet of Things start-up Silk Labs with two other members of the Firefox OS team (however, Silk Labs does not use Mozilla technologies). [15] Also in 2015, Gal became an adviser at Acadine Technologies; a startup newly founded by Li Gong (former president of Mozilla Corporation) which was to develop software based on Firefox OS. [16] As of 2018, Gal is an employee of Apple Inc.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Gal, Andreas (2006). Efficient bytecode verification and compilation in a virtual machine (Thesis). University of California, Irvine. Docket AAI3243940. ProQuest   305372416 . Retrieved 2020-12-13.
  2. 1 2 Iris Quirin. "Andreas Gal - Der Freiheitskämpfer" (in German). Archived from the original on 2014-04-26. Retrieved 26 April 2014.
  3. "Inter Node Protocol 3". Archived from the original on 2013-04-14.
  4. "INP3 support for Linux". Archived from the original on 2014-11-24. Retrieved 2013-03-03.
  5. "JNOS news". Archived from the original on 2014-04-27. Retrieved 2013-03-03.
  6. "(X)Net user manual" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-10-19. Retrieved 2013-03-03.
  7. "AspectC++: Language Proposal and Prototype Implementation". Archived from the original on 2013-04-09.
  8. "HotpathVM: an effective JIT compiler for resource-constrained Andreas Gal, Christian W. Probst, Michael Franz - Proceeding VEE '06 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Virtual execution environments doi : 10.1145/1134760.1134780.
  9. "TraceMonkey: JavaScript Lightspeed".
  10. "Mozilla Kills The PDF Plugin In Firefox 19". Archived from the original on 2014-11-26. Retrieved 2013-03-03.
  11. Gal, Andreas (2011-07-25). "Booting to the web". mozilla.dev.platform (Mailing list). Retrieved 2011-11-20.
  12. "Andreas Gal's Linkedin page".
  13. "Mozilla CTO: Andreas Gal".
  14. "New Adventure". Andreas Gal. 5 June 2015. Retrieved 2015-06-05.
  15. Shankland, Stephen (2016-08-21). "Startup aims to make home devices smart enough to anticipate what you need". CNET. Retrieved 2016-06-21.
  16. Shankland, Stephen (2015-12-10). "Startup picks up the torch for troubled Firefox OS". CNET. Retrieved 2015-12-12.