I have been working on a research project to make writing VMs easier. The idea arises from the following observation: writing a naive interpreter is not hard (just write a big switch-case), but writing a good interpreter (or JIT compiler) is hard, as it unavoidably involves hand-coding assembly. So why can’t we implement a special compiler to automatically generate a high-performance interpreter (and even the JIT) from “the big switch-case”, or more formally, a semantical description of what each bytecode does?

Building the fastest Lua interpreter.. automatically!

It is well-known that writing a good VM for a dynamic language is never an easy job. High-performance interpreters, such as the JavaScript interpreter in Safari, or the Lua interpreter in LuaJIT, are

^{sillycross.github.io}