Re: The MicroVM project

[Leonardo <leob@...>]

Since Lua Vermelha got mentioned :) , I'll make a note that it's built
using Eclipse OMR (https://github.com/eclipse/omr), which has some
similarities with MicroVM that are worth comparing (for those interested
in language implementations).

The goal of Eclipse OMR is to provide reusable components for building
language runtimes. This includes components providing platform and
hardware abstractions and concurrency. It also includes components for
building GCs and JIT compilers. In this sense, MicroVM and OMR provide
similar value.

However, a big difference is that OMR is an implementation; not a
specification. In this sense, OMR is closer to LLVM than MicroVM (though
still very different than LLVM). The technology in OMR is also quite
scalable. It's been used to build things as small as Lua Vermelha (still
larger than PUC Lua though) and as large as IBM's JVM (which is being
opensourced sometime this year, in case anyone is interested).

Lua Vermelha is still in it's very early stages. There's plenty of room
for improvements and optimization. I've really enjoyed working on it so
far though and I will try to spend more time working on it.

--
Leonardo

On 2017-05-24 03:40 PM, Fabio Mascarenhas wrote:
> On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 1:33 PM, Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:
>>
>> I think a more interesting target would be the CLR, especially since Microsoft is going Open Source and acquired >Xamarin. I know Fabio Mascarenhas and Roberto worked on something like this in 2008 (there is a paper about it >behind the ACM paywall: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1363686.1363743) but I have no idea if those efforts >have been pursued by anyone.
> 
> There is NeoLua (https://github.com/neolithos/neolua). It should be at
> least as fast as the Lua interpreter, and might be faster for some
> workloads once the DLR caches have warmed up, even if you do not use
> its optional typing (it can use optional type annotations like Ravi).
> 
> With Truffle the JVM should be a better platform for dynamic
> languages. There is a partial Lua implementation
> (https://github.com/lucasallan/LuaTruffle) that is complete enough to
> run the mandelbrot benchmark as fast as LuaJIT, once it has warmed up.
> :-)
> 
> LuaVermelha (https://github.com/Leonardo2718/lua-vermelha) is chugging
> along, and the best bet if you want an implementation of Lua 5.3 right
> now that is faster than the Lua interpreter.
> 
> Roberto has a student working on using LLVM as a backend for a tracing
> JIT, maybe he will chime in.
> 
>> --
>> Pierre Chapuis
>>
> 
> --
> Fabio Mascarenhas
>