Research on programming languages is often more fun when we can use our own languages. However, for research on performance optimizations that can be a trap. In the end, we need to argue that what we did is comparable to state-of-the-art language implementations. Ideally, we are able to show that our own little language is not just a research toy, but that it is, at least performance-wise, competitive with for instance Java or JavaScript VMs.
Yesterday at the Virtual Machine Meetup, I was giving a talk about why I think concurrent programming is hard, and what we can do about it.
As preparation for SPLASH’11, here my paper for the VMIL workshop. It is a position paper discussing in which direction virtual machines should evolve in the future with regard to the challenges manycore architectures and concurrent programming bring.
Thanks to the financial support of FWO and a grant by the summer school itself, I was able to go to Eugene, Oregon and learn about theory and practice of language implementation.