One VM to Rule Them All, One VM to Bind Them

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Screen recording of a Truffle tutorial at the PLDI conference.

Forget “this language is fast”, “this language has the libraries I need”, and “this language has the tool support I need”. The Truffle framework for implementing managed languages in Java gives you native performance, multi-language integration with all other Truffle languages, and tool support - all of that by just implementing an abstract syntax tree (AST) interpreter in Java.

Truffle applies AST specialization during interpretation, which enables partial evaluation to create highly optimized native code without the need to write a compiler specifically for a language. The Java VM contributes high-performance garbage collection, threads, and parallelism support.

This tutorial is both for newcomers who want to learn the basic principles of Truffle, and for people with Truffle experience who want to learn about recently added features. It presents the basic principles of the partial evaluation used by Truffle and the Truffle DSL used for type specializations, as well as features that were added recently such as the language-agnostic object model, language integration, and debugging support.

Oracle Labs and external research groups have implemented a variety of programming languages on top of Truffle, including JavaScript, Ruby, R, Python, and Smalltalk. Several of them already exceed the best implementation of that language that existed before.

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