The inevitable death of VMs: a progress report

Language virtual machines (VMs), as implementation artifacts, are characterised by hard boundaries which limit their conduciveness to language interoperability, whole-system tooling, and other interactions with the `world outside'. Since the VM paradigm emerged, it has become increasingly clear that no single language or VM can succeed to the exclusion of others. This motivates a different approach in which languages are no longer implemented as VMs per se, but as participants in certain shared system-wide protocols, shared across diverse collection of languages and constituting a more porous boundary. One means of achieving such a shift is to evolve the underlying infrastructure from an essentially Unix-like environment to one that incorporates VM-like services, including memory management primitives, as a core protocol shared between many language implementations. Ongoing work towards these goals within the liballocs runtime is discussed, specifically concerning pointer identification, process-wide garbage collection, and speculative optimisations.