Virtual Machines

by Iain D. Craig

I love virtual machines (VMs) and I have done for a long time.If that makes me "sad" or an "anorak", so be it. I love them because they are so much fun, as well as being so useful. They have an element of original sin (writing assembly programs and being in control of an entire machine), while still being able to claim that one is being a respectable member of the community (being structured, modular, high-level, object-oriented, and so on). They also allow one to design machines of one's own, unencumbered by the restrictions of a starts optimising it for some physical particular processor (at least, until one processor or other). I have been building virtual machines, on and off, since 1980 or there­ abouts. It has always been something of a hobby for me; it has also turned out to be a technique of great power and applicability. I hope to continue working on them, perhaps on some of the ideas outlined in the last chapter (I certainly want to do some more work with register-based VMs and concur­ rency). I originally wanted to write the book from a purely semantic viewpoint.

Hardcover

First published August 30, 2005

Reviews

[Naveed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books I wish I read years earlier. Modern computer science has virtualized everything lately. This works well because current hardware is often fast enough now that the benefits of virtualization outweigh its primary cost, performance. "Virtual Machines" is specifically about programming languages running on hardware abstractions. Many modern languages use this strategy such as C#, Java, Ruby, and JavaScript (my primary concern).

"Virtual Machines" covers the topic reasonably well using a combination of example languages (real and fictitious) and theoretical design. The examples are a bit light and some are long in the tooth for a modern audience. Nonetheless this book is invaluable for defining the common domain language and concepts that I find everywhere in source code I deal with (Mozilla JS engine, V8, etc).

I would also recommend this book to those interested in what physical (metal) machines and machine languages need to do. The general concepts and services have overlap with their virtual machine cousins and probably more digestible without all the hardware detail that you might find in a book specific to physical implementations.