Implementation of Dynamic Programming Languages

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Dynamic programming languages such as JavaScript, Python and Ruby are gaining in popularity. These languages offer many features which ease the development of evolvable complex applications: a rapid development cycle, introspection, language extensibility, high level of abstraction, code migration, etc. Current implementations of these languages use highly complex multi-tier designs which nevertheless still lag in terms of performance when compared to static programming languages (C, Java, etc). The long term objectives of the proposed research program are to lower the development cost of VMs for dynamic programming languages and improve their performance.******The research program will continue work on recent advancements in the field of Just-In-Time compilation. The technique of lazy Basic Block Versioning has been shown to be effective at eliminating run-time type checks from dynamically typed programs. This approach will first be extended to make it operate interprocedurally, both when the source program uses higher order functions and not. Then we will instigate the power of the approach by applying it to other compilation problems, including register allocation, memory management, function inlining and automatic program parallelization.*******We will also investigate the design of a self-hosted JIT compiler which can benefit from previous runs of the programs, possibly by other users at other locations, to reduce the cost of recompiling the program. We also plan to study the implementation of parallelism in the context of dynamic languages. We are interested in the parallelism model of the functional programming languages Clojure (based on transactions, agents), Erlang (based on Actors) and Termite (that offers task migration through continuation serialization).**