Re: Design of Virtual Machines

Dave <D.C.Page@massey.ac.nz> writes [in part]:


> I am interested in the design of virtual machines, their architecture,
> instructions sets, the context they were uses in, interpreters and so
> on.
>
> I would greatly appreciate any references to papers/books/web sites
> etc which cover the background and use of VMs.


Everybody will mention the Java VM, but i know of no good reference that
tells you why anyone would design this particular VM. I would also recommend
that you look into DIS virtual machine for the Inferno system from Bell labs
and hope that there is some document justifying its design. [there may be
some linkage with Chris Fraser's work on instruction sets in the past]
[Limbo is Limp but Dis is Cool! --anon]


Here are a few dated references off the cuff that include various virtual
machines, and may be helpful. [Sorry no web refs handy.]


Books:


      Daniel P. Friedman, Mitchell Wand, Christopher T. Haynes.
      Essentials of Programming Languages, MIT Press and McGraw-
      Hill, 1992.


      Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman,
      Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT
      Press, Cambridge, Mass., second edition 1996.


      Samuel Kamin, in Programming Languages: An Interpreter-based
      Approach, Addison-Wesley, 1990.


      Timothy A. Budd, A Little Smalltalk, Addison-Wesley, 1987.


Other:


      William Clinger, The Scheme 311 compiler: An Exercise in
      Denotational Semantics, Conference Record of the 1984 ACM
      Symposium on Lisp and Functional Programming, 1984, 356-364.


      R. Kent Dybvig, Three Implementation Models for Scheme,
      Department of Computer Science Technical Report #87-011
      (Ph.D. Dissertation), University of North Carolina at Chapel
      Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, April 1987.


      Marc Feeley and James S. Miller, A Parallel Virtual Machine
      for Efficient Scheme Compilation, Proceedings of the 1990
      ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, Nice,
      France, June 1990.




oz
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