A new architecture for the implementation of scripting languages
Adam Sah, Jon Blow · 1994
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 produc-tion 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. 1