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Sep 19, 2022 at 06:20
A decent part of VMs being faster than AST interpreters is just memory layout AIUI. VM instructions are largely flat arrays, so there's less pointer chasing.

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Oct 9, 2024 at 05:30
TIL Tcl has a notion of 'safe interpreters', a mode where you can run untrusted code in a sandbox: https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/safe.htm Not many programming languages have this, but it's way safer to include in the implementation than try to build as a userland library.
Tcl Tcl Built-In Commands - Safe manual page
Aug 27, 2023 at 03:53
Implementing interactive languages, and the tradeoffs of interpreters, JIT compilers, and AOT compilers:
Implementing interactive languages
May 4, 2023 at 06:52
On storing ASTs in flat arrays for performance, and the relationship with bytecode interpreters:
Flattening ASTs (and Other Compiler Data Structures)
Flattening ASTs (and Other Compiler Data Structures)
This is an introduction to data structure flattening, a special case of arena allocation that is a good fit for programming language implementations. We build a simple interpreter twice, the normal way and the flat way, and show that some fairly mechanical code changes can give you a 2.4× speedup.