MuPy: A First Language Client for Mu Micro Virtual Machine

John Zhang
Australian National University

Much of the complexity in programming language implementation is made up of
three fundamental concerns, namely concurrency, memory and hardware platform.
Many of the programming languages today, especially the managed languages,
have broken features due to the inappropriate treatment of these three
challenges. Micro Virtual Machines, a thin abstraction layer over these three
concerns, was proposed to free up the language implementers of making
compromises in language implementation to focus on the higher level features.

With the progress in the research of Mu, a concrete instance of Micro Virtual
Machine, its hypothesis and design can now be tested. To test Mu's design and
its ability to support non-trivial languages, I have embarked on the mission
to develop an RPython compiler targeting Mu. RPython, as a compiler framework,
has been used to implement interpreters for managed languages, and has
displayed promising results. Thus the development of an RPython language
client is a strategically critical step in providing the power of Mu to many
managed languages.

In this talk I report the design and progress of MuPy project, consisting of a
RPython compiler back-end artefact targeting Mu, as well as a language client
containing a launcher. In addition, I also discuss the issues encountered in
the development process, and how these issues have impacted the design of Mu.