Many languages have an underlying virtual machine (VM) to provide a more portable and convenient substrate for compilation or interpretation. For language research it’s useful to be able to generate custom VMs and other language tools for different languages. Which raises the question: what’s the appropriate language for writing experimental languages?
What I have in mind is slightly more than just VMs, and more a platform for experimenting with language design for novel environments such as sensor-driven systems. As well as a runtime, this requires the ability to parse, to represent and evaluate type and semantic rules, and to provide a general framework for computation that can then be exposed into a target language as constructs, types and so forth. What’s the right language in which to do all this?
