Titie: Draining the Swamp: Micro Virtual Machines as Solid Foundation
for Language Development

Kunshan Wang
Australian National University

Abstract:

Many of today's languages are broken. Their hard-to-reason-about
semantics, lack of features and low performance has cost us dearly.
Since language designs are usually implementation driven, the
difficulties in enginnering and the insufficient understanding of
concepts baked bad decisions into the language itself. We propose micro
virtual machines, a class of minimalist language runtime. Such VMs
provide abstractions over memory (garbage collection), architecture
(compiler backend) and concurrency, which we identify as the three
fundamental concerns that contribute to the complexities of language
implementation. Our goal is to empower the language develops with a
solid foundation and ease the development of performant and semantically
sound managed languages.