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The Alternative Implementation Problem | Pointers Gone Wild

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In this post, I want to talk about a dynamic that I’ve seen play itself over and over again in the software world. In fact, I would venture a guess that this kind of situation probably happens in the hardware world as well, but I’ll speak about software systems since this is where my experience lies. This discussion is going to touch a bit on human psychology, and outline a common trap so that you can hopefully avoid getting stuck in it. Most of my career, both in academia and industry, has been spent trying to optimize dynamically-typed programming languages. During my master’s I worked on a simple optimizing JIT for MATLAB. For my PhD I worked on a JIT for JavaScript. Today I’m working on YJIT, an optimizing JIT for Ruby which has now been upstreamed into CRuby. During my PhD, while working on my own JavaScript JIT, I read many papers and blog posts about JIT compilers for other dynamic languages. I read about the design of HotSpot, Self, LuaJIT, PyPy, TruffleJS, V8, SpiderMonkey, an

The Alternative Implementation Problem Pointers Gone Wild The Alternative Implementation Problem April 20th, 2024 In this post, I want to talk about a dynamic that I've seen play itself over and over again in the software world. In fact, I would venture a guess that this kind of situation probably happens in the hardware world as well, but I'll speak about software systems since this is where my experience lies. This discussion is going to touch a bit on human psychology, and outline a common trap so that you can hopefully avoid getting stuck in it. Most of my career, both in academia and indu

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