My second workshop paper got published at the ACM Digital Library. This is actually only an abstract, but nonetheless, it might be interesting for people looking into the design of virtual machines and especially bytecodes/intermediate languages.

Abstract

Today’s major high-level language virtual machines (VMs) are becoming successful in being multi-language execution platforms, hosting a wide range of languages. With the transition from few-core to many-core processors, we argue that VMs will also have to abstract from concrete concurrency models at the hardware level, to be able to support a wide range of abstract concurrency models on a language level. To overcome the lack of sufficient abstractions for concurrency concepts in VMs, we proposed earlier to extend VM intermediate languages by special concurrency constructs[PLACES09].

As a first step towards this goal, we try to fill a gap in the current literature and survey the intermediate language design of VMs. Our goal is to identify currently used techniques and principles as well as to gain an overview over the available concurrency related features in intermediate languages.

Another aspect of interest is the influence of the particular target language, for which the VM is originally intended, on the intermediate language.

• Paper: PDF ©ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in VMIL’09, October 25, 2009. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1711506.1711509
• BibTex: BibSonomy

Slides of the Talk at VMIL09/OOPSLA