Here is the revised version:
JavaScript is now the
most widely supported dynamic programming language in existence; it is
the language that powers the client-side of the web, and large
companies such as Google and Microsoft have clearly stated their intent
to build web applications intended to replace current desktop software
based on this technology. Finding ways to get better performance out of
JavaScript code and to provide more portable implementations of the
language have become foremost concerns.
The
Tachyon project is a research initiative involving the creation of a
meta-circular JavaScript virtual machine. This virtual machine is
meta-circular because it is itself written in JavaScript and intended
to compile and optimize itself just-in-time, along with client code, to
platform-specific machine code. This project was officially started
this year, and while still in early stages, has the potential to offer
researchers a simpler and powerful alternative to explore novel dynamic
language optimization techniques and study the behavior or dynamic
languages.
We
intend to use this project to demonstrate the potential performance and
design benefits of meta-circularity, to explore novel optimization
techniques based on dynamic analysis, dynamic recompilation and
on-stack replacement and to experiment with the idea of a virtual
machine capable of serializing its own state. We plan to integrate
Tachyon in a real web browser so as to test and demonstrate its
capabilities in real-world situations, on non-synthetic JavaScript
code. We further intend to make our system open source and available to
other researchers.