Abstract:
The disconnect between programming languages and the developer tools needed to make them useful has grown wide since the days of programming systems with integral tool support, such as Self (1989), Smalltalk (1980), and Lisp (1965). Tools now are typically an afterthought: expensive to develop, delivered late if ever, and arrive with undesirable performance trade-offs.
The time has come to build modern programming systems. We can do that by embedding flexible, reusable, low-overhead instrumentation and tool support deeply into modern Virtual Machines. We can “have it all”, but only if we can re-establish close collaboration between language engineers (who optimize utilization of expensive machines) and tool builders (who optimize utilization of expensive people).
Michael Van De Vanter, "Building Flexible, Low-Overhead Tooling Support into a High-Performance Polyglot VM: Extended Abstract", MoreVMs 2017 Workshop on Modern Language Runtimes, Ecosystems, and VMs (MoreVMs 2017), Brussels, Belgium, April 2, 2017 (PDF) (Video).
The disconnect between programming languages and the developer tools needed to make them useful has grown wide since the days of programming systems with integral tool support, such as Self (1989), Smalltalk (1980), and Lisp (1965). Tools now are typically an afterthought: expensive to develop, delivered late if ever, and arrive with undesirable performance trade-offs.
The time has come to build modern programming systems. We can do that by embedding flexible, reusable, low-overhead instrumentation and tool support deeply into modern Virtual Machines. We can “have it all”, but only if we can re-establish close collaboration between language engineers (who optimize utilization of expensive machines) and tool builders (who optimize utilization of expensive people).
Michael Van De Vanter, "Building Flexible, Low-Overhead Tooling Support into a High-Performance Polyglot VM: Extended Abstract", MoreVMs 2017 Workshop on Modern Language Runtimes, Ecosystems, and VMs (MoreVMs 2017), Brussels, Belgium, April 2, 2017 (PDF) (Video).