Faster Virtual Machines: Speeding Up Programming Language Execution (2023)
a day ago
- #virtual-machine
- #bytecode
- #performance
- Explores different implementations of virtual machines (VMs) for executing bytecode.
- Introduces a custom bytecode language with stack-based operations like CONSTANT, ADD, PRINT, etc.
- Compares performance of a basic interpreter, custom jump table, tail-call-based interpreter, and a compiler approach.
- Demonstrates significant speed improvements with each optimization step, especially with the compiler approach.
- Discusses the use of X-macros to generically define instructions across different VM implementations.
- Highlights real-world applicability and limitations, noting that dynamic languages like Python may not benefit as much from these optimizations.