Inria pays tribute to Gilles Muller, who passed away on November 17th 2021.

After a PhD at the University of Rennes 1 in 1988, he was recruited as a researcher at Inria within the LSP / SOLIDOR team, before participating in the creation of the COMPOSE team with Charles Consel in 1996. In 2002, he was appointed professor at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes and was a member of the OBASCO team. In 2009 he was appointed Inria Research Director, and joined Inria Paris and the REGAL team before forming the WHISPER team in 2014.

He was a strong supporter of the development of new methodologies based on the use of domain-specific languages ​​for structuring operating systems and their kernel. Nothing annoyed him more (to put it mildly) than seeing that the development of operating systems was seen as an activity on the fringes of software development, that generality was sacrificed for the benefit of performance, that the widespread use of Insecure programming languages, combined with hazardous manual optimizations, greatly compromised the security of operating systems. Gilles fought to the end to carry this vision which he widely disseminated in the community.

 

This book of testimonies is open to all those who wish to make a personal contribution in tribute to Gilles Muller.