SubstrateVM Questions

[Christian Wimmer]

On 08/08/2016 01:06 PM, Sidharth Kshatriya wrote:
> Thanks for your reply. I guess I don't understand the technology stack
> intimately yet so I found the answer a bit confusing. My main concern is
> : will I be able to construct a VM (which has very fast start up time)
> for my custom language myself?

Yes, that is the plan.  Of course your language implementation will need 
to adhere to all the restrictions that Substrate VM has, e.g., your 
language implementation must not use reflection.

> P.S. links to some documentation on substrate VM will be useful. Not
> much stuff is available on the net about it.

I know, and releasing the binaries also means that we will write proper 
documentation on how to use it and how it works.

-Christian


> On Aug 9, 2016 12:10 AM, "Christian Wimmer" <christian.wimmer at oracle.com
> <mailto:christian.wimmer at oracle.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     On 07/30/2016 05:48 AM, Sidharth Kshatriya wrote:
>
>         Graal/Truffle with Sulong seems to be a really compelling
>         platform to build
>         a programming language! Uniquely, there are also a large number
>         of papers
>         that go into detail on how things work. Its well documented too!
>
>         There is one point of concern and that is the warm up time of any
>         programming language JIT built on truffle/graal. Many dynamic
>         scripting
>         languages need to start up quickly and do their job. So while
>         long running
>         scripts will do the job well I'm concerned about the merits of
>         making a
>         dynamic language port using graal/truffle with the long warmup.
>
>         I learnt about SubstrateVM in which you AOT compile some code
>         which fixes
>         startup time issues. Is that something that will be available to
>         external
>         implementers? Or will this just be something for scripting engines
>         "blessed" by Oracle?
>
>
>     Our first step will be to put Substrate VM binaries on OTN, where we
>     also release Graal VM.
>
>         Also this SubstrateVM sounds like its going to have an embedded
>         hotspot VM
>         (if I can imagine correctly). Does that have implications for
>         any external
>         party wanting to distribute their scripting engine executable?
>
>
>     There are no parts from the HotSpot VM inside an executable created
>     for a Truffle language (or other Java application).
>
>     The build process of the executable currently runs only on the Graal
>     VM (or in the future on Java 9, since we do not depend on Graal but
>     only on the JVMCI API that HotSpot will have built in soon).
>
>     -Christian
>