A new architecture for the implementation of scripting languages

Authors:
Adam Sah;Jon Blow
Affiliations:
Computer Science Division, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA;Computer Science Division, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Venue:
VHLLS'94 Proceedings of the USENIX 1994 Very High Level Languages Symposium Proceedings on USENIX 1994 Very High Level Languages Symposium Proceedings
Year:
1994

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Abstract

Nearly all scripting languages today are implemented as interpreters written in C. We propose an alternate architecture where the language is translated into the dynamic language Scheme [R4RS]. The plethora of high quality, public domain Scheme implementations give the developer a wide selection of interpreters, byte compilers, and machine code compilers to use as targets for her VHLL. Our VHLL, Rush, provides high-level features such as automatic type conversion and production rules [SHH86][Ston93]. Performance benchmarks show that our system runs with acceptable speed; in fact, Rush programs run much more quickly than their equivalents in languages such as Tcl and Perl4. Whereas those languages are coded in C, Rush takes advantage of Scheme's existing high-level features, saving development time. Since the features provided by Scheme are among those most VHLLs share, we expect this approach to be widely applicable.