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Back to [[conference:committee:proposals-2013]]\\
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**Title**: Fast Enough VMs in Fast Enough Time\\
**Proposer**: [[2013:laurence_tratt]]\\
**Type**: Tutorial/Experience Report\\
**Duration**: 90 minutes\\
**Description**: 
Programming language designers face an unpleasant dilemma when it comes to
  implementing their languages: too little implementation, and it will be
  laughed at as too slow; too much, and it will divert energy away from design.
  Lacking the manpower to make a plausibly fast implementation, many
  interesting language design ideas have faded unfairly into obscurity. We all
  live with the consequences.\\
\\
  In this talk I look at a new mode of creating "fast enough virtual machines
  in fast enough time" Virtual Machines (VMs), using the meta-tracing JIT
  language RPython. Unlike previous approaches, RPython creates VMs that
  automatically come with a JIT customised for the language being interpreted.
  RPython has been used to implement a new VM for Python that gives an average
  speed-up of 5x over the stock VM, and thus demonstrably scales to "real"
  languages. Such VMs will change the language landscape of the future.\\
\\
  I will explain the performance trade-offs of existing approaches to language
  implementation, how meta-tracing works, and what the performance
  consequences (good and bad) for programmers of this new breed of VMs are.\\
\\

\\ Asti - eh, I'm not crazy about this \\
Roger: hard to tell if this is a 'brave new idea' or yet another cul-de-sac.\\