Building high-performance virtual machines is a complex and expensive undertaking; many popular languages still have low-performance implementations. We describe a new approach to virtual machine (VM) construction that amortizes much of the effort in initial construction by allowing new languages to be implemented with modest additional effort. The approach relies on abstract syntax tree (AST) interpretation where a node can rewrite itself to a more specialized or more general node, together with an optimizing compiler that exploits the structure of the interpreter. The compiler uses speculative assumptions and deoptimization in order to produce efficient machine code. Our initial experience suggests that high performance is attainable while preserving a modular and layered architecture, and that new highperformance language implementations can be obtained by writing little more than a stylized interpreter.

Truffle is a Java-based framework for developing high-performance language runtimes. Language implementers aiming at developing new runtimes have to design all the runtime mechanisms for managing dynamically typed objects from scratch. This not only leads to potential code duplication, but also impacts the actual time needed to develop a fully-fledged runtime.In this paper we address this issue by introducing a common object storage model (OSM) for Truffle that can be used by language implementers to develop new runtimes. The OSM is generic, language-agnostic, and portable, as it can be used to implement a great variety of dynamic languages. It is extensible, featuring built-in support for custom extension mechanisms. It is also highperformance, as it is designed to benefit from the optimizing compiler in the Truffle framework. Our initial evaluation indicates that the Truffle OSM can be used to implement high-performance language runtimes, with no performance overhead when compared to language-specific solutions.

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