research-article

One VM to rule them all

Authors:

Thomas Würthinger,

Christian Wimmer,

Gilles Duboscq,

Christian Humer,

Gregor Richards,

Mario WolczkoAuthors Info & Claims

Onward! 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming & software

Pages 187 - 204

https://doi.org/10.1145/2509578.2509581

Published: 29 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Building high-performance virtual machines is a complex and expensive undertaking; many popular languages still have low-performance implementations. We describe a new approach to virtual machine (VM) construction that amortizes much of the effort in initial construction by allowing new languages to be implemented with modest additional effort. The approach relies on abstract syntax tree (AST) interpretation where a node can rewrite itself to a more specialized or more general node, together with an optimizing compiler that exploits the structure of the interpreter. The compiler uses speculative assumptions and deoptimization in order to produce efficient machine code. Our initial experience suggests that high performance is attainable while preserving a modular and layered architecture, and that new high-performance language implementations can be obtained by writing little more than a stylized interpreter.

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Pichler CUrban-Forster BLi PSchatz RMössenböck HUgawa T(2025)Fast and Compact: Reducing Size of AOT-Compiled Java Code without Sacrificing PerformanceProceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3759426.3760976(12-22)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2025
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Index Terms

One VM to rule them all
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments

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