simplelanguage

That sort of stuff is easy to do with Truffle (which, ironically, lets you define a language using what they call the "truffle dsl"). The SimpleLanguage tutorial language has a bigint style number scheme with efficient optimization: https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage/blob/master/langua...

Truffle has no opinion on how you parse the sources. It cares about how you execute them from an intermediate Truffle guided representation produced by the parser. In other words antlr and truffle are a great fit. We even use this pairing for our example language simplelanguage. https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

really developers manipulate abtract words that are ungrounded in reality. You care about speed, feature set/expressivity and simplicity. GraalVM has the three, it is the fastest JIT out there, it brings you so many features out of the box, including state of the art grabage collector and unique language polyglotism interop, and the API is the simplest there is for building a language. https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

The state of the art is GraalVM/sulong, and enable you polyglotism. see e.g. https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

Do you have any feedback on how we could improve the docs? If so, please let us know. I believe the easiest way to start a new Truffle language implementation is to fork SimpleLanguage [1] and turn it into your language. Did you try to do that? [1] https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

> Can someone please give a sober explanation of what GraalVM, is and how Truffle works? GraalVM is basically a JVM with a new compiler, the Graal compiler. Truffle is the language implementation framework for GraalVM and designed to build AST interpreter. The Graal compiler can optimize Truffle ASTs through partial evaluation (see "One VM to rule them all" paper [1]), and produces machine code directly without using Java bytecode as IR. > how do JS semantics get expressed in a Java VM? Graal.js comes with a parser for JavaScript code that generates a Truffle ASTs for a given JavaScript program. JS semantics are defined within the AST nodes (see [2]). > What does a getProperty instruction look like? I think getProperty is implemented in `CachedGetPropertyNode` [3], but I am not sure as there are multiple other property-related nodes. > Ho

Truffle makes it possible to implement a JITed dynamically-typed language simply by annotating actions on the AST. http://www.graalvm.org/docs/graalvm-as-a-platform/implement-... Here's an example of the addition operator from Graal's SimpleLanguage: @NodeInfo(shortName = "+") public abstract class SLAddNode extends SLBinaryNode { @Specialization(rewriteOn = ArithmeticException.class) protected long add(long left, long right) { return Math.addExact(left, right); } @Specialization @TruffleBoundary protected SLBigNumber add(SLBigNumber left, SLBigNumber right) { return new SLBigNumber(left.getValue().add(right.getValue())); } @Specialization(guards = "isString(left, right)") @TruffleBoundary protected String add(Object left, Object right) { retu