Archive of posts with the tag Language Implementation

• Nov 17, 2023: The Changing “Guarantees” Given by Python's Global Interpreter Lock

  In this blog post, I will look into the implementation details of CPython’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and how they changed between Python 3.9 and the current development branch that will become Python 3.13.

• Oct 16, 2023: Which Interpreters are Faster, AST or Bytecode?

  This post is a brief overview of our new study of abstract-syntax-tree and bytecode interpreters on top of RPython and the GraalVM metacompilation systems, which we are presenting next week at OOPSLA.

• Sep 11, 2023: An Introduction to Interpreters and JIT Compilation

  Last week, I gave two lectures at the Programming Language Implementation Summer School (PLISS). PLISS was very well organized and the students and other presenters made for a very enjoyable week of new ideas, learning, and discussing.

• Jun 6, 2023: Squeezing a Little More Performance Out of Bytecode Interpreters

• Feb 18, 2021: Open Postdoc Position on Language Implementation and Concurrency

• Jan 2, 2021: Towards a Synthetic Benchmark to Assess VM Startup, Warmup, and Cold-Code Performance

  One of the hard problems in language implementation research is benchmarking. Some people argue, we should benchmark only applications that actually matter to people. Though, this has various issues. Often, such applications are embedded in larger systems, and it’s hard to isolate the relevant parts. In many cases, these applications can also not be made available to other researchers. And, of course, things change over time, which means maintaining projects like DaCapo, Renaissance, or Jet Stream is a huge effort.

• Dec 30, 2020: The Shape of 6M Lines of Ruby

  Following up on my last blog post, I am going to look at how Ruby is used to get a bit of an impression of whether there are major differences between Ruby and Smalltalk in their usage.

• Dec 15, 2020: The Shape of 1.7M Lines of Code

  Recently, I was wondering how large code bases look like when it comes to the basic properties compiler might care about. And here I am not thinking about dynamic properties, but simply static properties such as length of methods, number of methods per class, number of fields, and so on.

• Dec 7, 2020: Preventing Concurrency Bugs from Causing Harm, Automatically

• Oct 19, 2020: Irrationally Annoyed: The SIGPLAN Blog Post writing 30 Years of PL Research Out of Existence

  I started writing this post when being very very annoyed by this blog post on the SIGPLAN blog. I could not understand how “THE SIGPLAN” blog could simply write 30 years of programming language research out of existence, only barely acknowledging Self and JavaScript. It felt like duty called…

• Aug 8, 2020: Metaprogramming, Metaobject Protocols, Gradual Type Checks: Optimizing the "Unoptimizable" Using Old Ideas

  Last year, I was asked to give a talk for the Meta’19 workshop. It’s a workshop on metaprogramming and reflection. The submission deadline for this year’s edition, is less than a month away: Check it out!

• Jul 7, 2020: Is This Noise, or Does This Mean Something? #benchmarking

  Do my performance measurements allow me to conclude anything at all?

• Jun 26, 2020: An Introduction to Efficient and Safe Implementations of Dynamic Languages

  Last September, I had a lot of fun putting together a lecture on language implementation techniques. It is something I wanted to do for a while, but I had not had a good excuse before to actually do it.

• Jan 12, 2016: Type Hierarchies and Guards in Truffle Languages

  Continuing a little bit with writing notes on Truffle and Graal, this one is based on my observations in SOMns and changes to its message dispatch mechanism. Specifically, I refactored the main message dispatch chain in SOMns. As in Self and Newspeak, all interactions with objects are message sends. Thus, field access and method invocation is essentially the same. This means that message sending is a key to good performance.

• Oct 19, 2015: Tracing vs. Partial Evaluation: Comparing Meta-Compilation Approaches for Self-Optimizing Interpreters

  Back in 2013 when looking for a way to show that my ideas on how to support concurrency in VMs are practical, I started to look into meta-compilation techniques. Truffle and RPython are the two most promising systems to build fast language implementations without having to implement a compiler on my own. While these two approaches have many similarities, from a conceptual perspective, they take two different approaches that can be seen as the opposite ends of a spectrum. So, I thought, it might be worthwhile to investigate them a little closer.

• Sep 22, 2014: Are We There Yet? Simple Language-Implementation Techniques for the 21st Century

  The first results of my experiments with self-optimizing interpreters was finally published in IEEE Software. It is a brief and very high-level comparison of the Truffle approach with a classic bytecode-based interpreter on top of RPython. If you aren’t familiar with either of these approaches, the article is hopefully a good starting point. The experiments described in it use SOM, a simple Smalltalk.