Data and type optimizations in virtual machine interpreters

Abstract

Virtual machines provide a portable platform for the execution of programming languages. They are popular amongst language designers as they simplify the task of developing a language and its features. Programmers benefit from virtual machines as a single implementation of a program can be run on many platforms. Virtual machine interpreter implementations are commonly slower than an equivalent native implementation. The optimization of virtual machine interpreters is the goal of many virtual machine research projects. In this dissertation, we investigate optimizations for two different interpreters implementing the programming languages Java and Lua.