How to Build a Virtual Machine



The title pretty much says it all. In this presentation, Terence Parr gives you an idea of the core mechanisms behind virtual machines, “Java has a virtual machine, [as do] Python, Ruby, a lot of these fun languages that you're using. JavaScript originally was purely an interpreted language. This will give you an idea of how all these things are built.”

Terence, a professor at the University of San Francisco, adds that despite this demo being really simple, and geared towards programmers without much language implementation experience, it is exactly what he built the first time he built a commercial interpreter for car manufacturer Renault.

This talk is from the San Francisco Language Design and Implementation Meetup of which Terence is the organizer.

 

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Published July 3, 2014