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POMatching a virtual machine design with its primary programming language
 

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  1. POMatching a virtual machine design with its primary programming language
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    <p>As background for a side project, I've been reading about different virtual machine designs, with the JVM of course getting the most press. I've also looked at BEAM (Erlang), GHC's RTS (kind of but not quite a VM) and some of the JavaScript implementations. Python also has a bytecode interpreter that I know exists, but have not read much about.</p> <p>What I have not found is a good explanation of <strong>why particular virtual machine design choices are made for a particular language</strong>. I'm particularly interested in design choices that would fit with concurrent and/or very dynamic (Ruby, JavaScript, Lisp) languages.</p> <hr> <p><strong>Edit:</strong> In response to a comment asking for specificity here is an example. The JVM uses a stack machine rather then a register machine, which was very controversial when Java was first introduced. It turned out that the engineers who designed the JVM had done so intending platform portability, and converting a stack machine back into a register machine was easier and more efficient then overcoming an impedance mismatch where there were too many or too few registers virtual. </p> <p>Here's another example: for Haskell, the paper to look at is <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/spineless-tagless-gmachine.ps.gz">Implementing lazy functional languages on stock hardware: the Spineless Tagless G-machine</a>. This is very different from any other type of VM I know about. And in point of fact GHC (the premier implementation of Haskell) does not run live, but is used as an intermediate step in compilation. Peyton-Jones lists no less then 8 other virtual machines that didn't work. I would like to understand why some VM's succeed where other fail.</p>
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    1. USJohn F. Miller
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    1. COThis is a bit too broad a topic. Can you give some particular aspects of the design that you are most interested in? Or any other examples. +1 from me anyway since this could result in some interesting answers.
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    2. COThe Dalvik JVM uses register based architecture - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)
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    3. COYou should look at the documentation for Parrot http://www.parrot.org/, which was originally designed for Perl but has since been used for several other languages. The documentation talks about VM features for dynamically typed languages vs. more static languages like Java.
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