[Pdx-pm] January Meeting

[Igal Koshevoy]

chromatic wrote:
> I'm happy to talk about "How a Virtual Machine Works", if anyone's interested.  
> I'll try to keep it at a high level, but I'll explain:
>
> 	- parsing
> 	- conversion to execution forms
> 	- memory management
> 	- dispatch and dispatch techniques
> 	- JIT
> 	- calling conventions
> 	- opcodes/bytecode
> 	- interoperability
> 	- optimization strategies
>
> It'll probably be Perl 5 and Parrot specific (as those are the two examples I 
> know best), but a lot of the techniques work similarly in other VMs (Python, 
> JVM, CLR, Lua virtual machine, Tamarin, V8) -- and it's interesting to know 
> how things work, especially when people start talking about JITs and tagging 
> and trace trees and SSA.
>
> I may also be able to scare up some books to give away.
>   

Sounds interesting to me.

We're also covering a related topic at the next pdxfunc meeting:

http://calagator.org/events/1250456023
> Portland Functional Programmers Study Group
> Monday, December 8, 2008 from 7–9pm, CubeSpace
>
> Jim Blandy will present trace-based just-in-time compilation 
> techniques, how they're being used in his work at Mozilla with the 
> SpiderMonkey JavaScript implementation, and how these can be applied 
> to functional programming languages. Jim is a contributor to GNU 
> Emacs, Guile, GDB, EGLIBC, Mozilla SpiderMonkey, Subversion, and others.

-igal