Dynamic Languages Symposium 2013  OOPSLA/SPLASH 2013

Co-located with SPLASH 2013

In association with ACM SIGPLAN

Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, October 28, 2013

http://www.dynamic-languages-symposium.org/dls-13/

Invited talk

VMs I Have Known And/Or Loved
Mario Wolczko (Oracle, USA)

For most of my ~30 year career I've been working on Virtual Machines. In that time, much has changed. VMs were obscure in the 1980s; now they underpin much of computing. Performance has improved by about two orders of magnitude; complexity by much more than that. And yet, many problems remain. In this talk, I will use VMs which I've worked on (for Smalltalk, Self and Java) to outline some of the milestones of the past 30 years, list some of the problematic areas, and describe work in progress in Oracle Labs' Virtual Machine Research Group, which is attempting to address some of the problems in building new, high-performance VMs for dynamic languages.

Mario Wolczko has been a researcher and research manager in Sun Labs and Oracle Labs since 1993 (and before that, was an academic researcher). His current title is Architect. His research interests include language implementation with an emphasis on virtual machines, computer architecture and memory systems design, garbage collection, object-oriented programming languages and performance instrumentation.

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