[Pdx-pm] January Meeting

[chromatic]

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.

-- c