We would like to submit a talk proposal for the Compiler-Driven Performance Workshop.

Talk title: Tachyon: a Meta-circular Optimizing JavaScript Virtual Machine

Author list:
Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert
Erick Lavoie
Marc Feeley
Bruno Dufour

Speaker: Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert

Abstract:

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.

- Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert