SHF: Medium: Collaborative Research: Micro Virtual Machines for Managed Languages: Abstraction, defined and contained

题目：用于托管语言的微型虚拟机：抽象，包含今天的大部分软件都是用托管语言编写的。这些语言通过在非常高的层次上支持编程来提高软件的生产力，从而隐藏了现代计算机硬件和操作系统的复杂性。例如JavaScript、PHP、Objective-C、Java、c#、Python和Ruby。这些语言在经济上很重要。不幸的是，这些语言大多效率低下，与c等正统语言选择相比，它们的开销高达50倍。这项研究的广泛影响有两个方面：(1)由于托管语言日益成为经济的关键，部署在全球电子商务平台和互联网应用（包括亚马逊、b谷歌、Facebook、苹果、甲骨文和微软等主要软件公司）的机房中，提高这些托管语言平台的可靠性和性能将带来经济效率和资源效率，其形式是降低数据中心的电力成本和延长移动设备的电池寿命；(2)关于计算机领域的人类多样性，该研究将吸引来自代表性不足群体的本科生，并鼓励他们攻读计算机和研究领域的研究生和职业。这个研究项目正在定义、开发、评估和细化管理语言实现的新基础层的基本组件。在这样做的过程中，它通过将“微虚拟机”（microVM）作为托管语言实现的高效高性能基础，解决了系统效率低下的一个关键来源。microVM和现有托管语言实现之间的关系类似于操作系统微内核和单片操作系统（如Linux）之间的关系。microVM认识到，存在一个定义良好的基础，对于大多数现代语言来说都是通用的，它可以负责对硬件、并发性和内存的基本抽象。通过隔离和公开这个基础，microVM体现了语言实现者可以使用的最先进的基础技术，同时将他们与这些抽象的有害复杂性隔离开来，使他们能够专注于所有重要的特定于语言的优化。这项研究使更高效的软件成为可能，并使语言实现的研究和开发更加明确。该研究的智力优势在于：(1)通过原型设计和评估，研究和确定正确的微虚拟机抽象，允许低级语言中立和高级语言特定关注点的清晰分离，捕获核心行为，同时也允许高性能语言实现；(2)产生二次研究挑战，特别是关于硬件、并发性和内存抽象的有效和高效组合；(3)为正式验证创建一个可行的目标，因为microVM具有相对较小的代码库，从而在迈向可靠子系统的道路上迈出了一步，以确保托管软件。

Title: Micro Virtual Machines for Managed Languages: Abstraction, containedA large fraction of today's software is written in managed languages. These languages increase software productivity by supporting programming at a very high level, hiding the complexity of modern computer hardware and operating systems. Examples include JavaScript, PHP, Objective-C, Java, C#, Python, and Ruby. These languages have great economic importance. Unfortunately, most of these languages are inefficient, imposing overheads as large as a factor of fifty compared to orthodox language choices such as C. The broader impacts of this research are two-fold: (1) Since managed languages are increasingly becoming economic linchpins, deployed in the engine rooms of global e-commerce platforms and Internet applications (including those of key software companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft), improving the reliability and performance of these managed language platforms will lead to economic efficiencies as well as resource efficiencies in the form of reduced power costs to data centers and improved battery lifetime on mobile devices;(2) Concerning human diversity in the computing field, the research will engage undergraduates from under-represented groups, and encourage them to pursue graduate school and careers in computing and research.This research project is defining, developing, evaluating, and refining the essential components of a new foundation layer for managed language implementation. In doing so, it addresses a key source of systemic inefficiency, by pioneering the "micro virtual machine" (microVM) as an efficient high-performance substrate for managed language implementation. The relationship between a microVM and existing managed language implementations is analogous to that between an operating system micro kernel and monolithic operating systems such as Linux. The microVM captures the insight that there exists a well-defined foundation common to most modern languages that can take responsibility for fundamental abstractions over hardware, concurrency, and memory. By isolating and exposing this substrate, the microVM embodies state-of-the-art base technology available to language implementers while isolating them from the pernicious complexities of these abstractions, freeing them to focus on all-important language-specific optimizations. The research is enabling more efficient software and a distinctly sharper focus for language implementation research and development. The intellectual merits of the research are: (1) Researching and identifying, via prototyping and evaluation, the right microVM abstractions, allowing clean separation of low-level language-neutral and high-level language-specific concerns, capturing the core behaviors, while also admitting high-performance language implementations; (2) Generating secondary research challenges, especially with regard to the effective and efficient combination of abstractions for hardware, concurrency, and memory; and (3) Creating a viable target for formal verification because the microVM has a relatively small code base, thus taking one step on the way towards trustworthy subsystems for assurance of managed software.