Opportunities for a Truffle-based Golo Interpreter

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of using the Truffle framework to develop an interpreter for Golo, a JVM language, aiming to compare its efficiency and engineering effort against existing invokedynamic-based implementations.

Contribution

It proposes experimenting with a Truffle-based interpreter for Golo to evaluate its benefits and trade-offs compared to current runtime implementations.

Findings

Potential for efficient interpreters using Truffle and Graal

Comparison of invokedynamic and Truffle approaches for JVM languages

Insights into engineering efforts for language runtime development

Abstract

Golo is a simple dynamically-typed language for the Java Virtual Machine. Initially implemented as a ahead-of-time compiler to JVM bytecode, it leverages invokedy-namic and JSR 292 method handles to implement a reasonably efficient runtime. Truffle is emerging as a framework for building interpreters for JVM languages with self-specializing AST nodes. Combined with the Graal compiler, Truffle offers a simple path towards writing efficient interpreters while keeping the engineering efforts balanced. The Golo project is interested in experimenting with a Truffle interpreter in the future, as it would provides interesting comparison elements between invokedynamic versus Truffle for building a language runtime.