Meet the GraalVM, a technology you can use to build composable high-performance language implementations and tools. Most production-level virtual machines duplicate their target language’s semantics in the interpreter, in the compiler, and in the runtime system. This violates DRY and is hell on the maintainers as the target evolves. In contrast, Truffle lets you define languages by simply writing their interpreter. That interpreter can be seamlessly combined with interpreters of different languages in a single just-in-time compilation unit. By treating the host language as just another language, you can reuse embeddings across languages. A language agnostic instrumentation mechanism enables us to build tools that attach cross-cutting concerns to applications with zero overhead.

The discussion following this talk will be moderated by Eelco Visser.

Christian Humer is a researcher at Oracle Labs in Zurich, working on the GraalVM project. He develops the Truffle framework which aims to make all programming languages fast, composable and embeddable. His research interests include virtual machines, partial evaluation, and domain-specific languages. He is the main author of Truffle DSL, a domain-specific language to simplify the development of Truffle interpreters.