DEdensh·Jul 10, 2025
Hey, as someone who spent a few years reimplementing another language trying to decouple it from JVM (Scala JVM -> Scala Native), some pitfalls to avoid:
- Don't try to provide backwards compatible subset of JVM APIs. While this might seem tempting to support very important library X with just a bit of work, I'd rather see new APIs that are only possible with your language / runtime. Otherwise you might end up stuck in never-ending stream of requests to add one more JVM feature to get yet another library from the original JVM language running. Focus on providing your own unique APIs or bindings to native projects that might not be easy to do elsewhere.
- Don't implement your own GC, just use mmtk [1]. It takes a really long time to implement something competitive, and mmtk already has an extensible and pluggable GC design that gets some o
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f the best performance available today [2] without much effort on your end.
- Don't underestimate complexity and importance of multi-threading and concurrency. Try to think of supporting some form of it early or you might get stuck single threaded world forever (see CPython). Maybe you don't do shared memory multi threading and then it could be quite easy to implement (as in erlang). No shared memory also means no shared heap, which makes GCs's life much easier.
- Don't spend too much time benchmarking and optimizing single threaded performance against JVM as performance baseline. If you don't have a compelling use case (usually due to unique libraries), the performance might not matter enough for users to migrate to your language. When you do optimize, I'd rather see fast startup, interactive environment (think V8), over slow startup but eventually efficient after super long warmup (like jvm).
I see that jank is already doing at least some of the things right based on the docs, so this message might be more of a dump of mistakes I've done previously in this space.
[1]: https://github.com/mmtk/mmtk-core
[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3519939.3523440