Steve Blackburn: Micro Virtual Machines (Lecture 2/2)

From PLISS'17: https://pliss2017.github.io/index.html
This video contains occasional loud interference.

Many of today’s programming languages are broken. Poor performance, lack of features and hard-to-reason-about semantics can cost dearly in software maintenance and inefficient execution. An important reason for this brokenness is that much of language design is implementation-driven. The difficulties in implementation and insufficient understanding of concepts bake bad designs into the language itself. Concurrency, architectural details and garbage collection are three fundamental concerns that contribute much to the complexities of implementing managed languages. In this lecture I will describe the micro virtual machine, a thin abstraction designed specifically to relieve implementers of managed languages of the most fundamental implementation challenges that currently impede good design. The micro virtual machine targets abstractions over memory (garbage collection), architecture (compiler backend), and concurrency. I will motivate the micro virtual machine and give an account of the design and initial experience of a concrete instance, which we call Mu, built over a four year period. Our goal is to remove an important barrier to performant and semantically sound managed language design and implementation.