[kaba0]

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. I do know that Truffle works by writing an AST interpreter for another language, but to achieve the best performance you have to map/reuse existing java constructs. E.g. I have read that perhaps Ruby uses java exceptions in a not too idiomatic way, but this is what Graal can later optimize to very good code.

My way out of depth idea with Sulong is that it uses small heap-allocated regions for every manual memory usage (it even has a Managed mode in Enterprise).

[mike_hearn]

You use Java constructs to implement the interpreter, but that doesn't mean the language itself has to be mapped to Java constructs, any more than writing an interpreter in C means your language has to be mapped to C semantics.

Sulong uses a standard C-style heap in the open source version. In EE they (can) trap malloc/free and re-point it towards the GCd heap. They also do bounds checking on pointer de-references. It's actually amazingly cool but unfortunately, EE is expensive enough in dollar terms that it gets ignored. I don't know of anything that uses it for real.