An extended abstract proposing a presentation on our efforts to adapt a virtual machine tailored for one programming language to another. Presented at the MoreVMs workshop of Programming 2017. Avaliable in preprint.
We adapt SOMns, a Truffle-based interpreter for Newspeak, to the Grace programming language. We highlight differ- ences between the semantics of these languages and offer preliminary results showing that adaption is possible while retaining performance. The similarities between the lan- guages promote the potential for adaption and code shar- ing between implementations. Through experimentation we intend to explore how the design of the tailored imple- mentation; the flexibility of the underlying framework; and similarities between languages affect adaptability, and by doing so hope to realize a set of mechanisms that can be easily extended to create optimized virtual machines for object-orientated languages.