Some of you may be interested in the following OOPSLA workshop...

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                  CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
                    OOPSLA'99 WORKSHOP

Simplicity, Performance and Portability in Virtual Machine Design

                    Denver, Colorado
                    November 2, 1999

ORGANIZERS

  John Maloney, Walt Disney Imagineering
  Antero Taivalsaari, Sun Microsystems Labs
  Dan Ingalls, Walt Disney Imagineering


THEME OF THE WORKSHOP

For decades, computer scientists and practitioners have been
fascinated by the idea of portable, hardware-independent
programs that are capable of running unchanged on a wide
variety of machines.  In programming languages such as Lisp,
Forth, Smalltalk and Java, this independence has been
achieved by utilizing a virtual machine (VM): a portable
program that implements a virtual processor for that language.

Virtual machine design typically involves many tradeoffs.
One tradeoff of particular interest to us is the tradeoff
between simplicity, which often confers benefits such as
portability and reliability, and performance. Historically,
the object-oriented language community has needed to prove
that object-oriented languages could rival the efficiency
of procedural languages, and thus researchers have not
always fully explored the benefits of simpler, more portable
virtual machine designs.

An example of such a performance vs. simplicity tradeoff
arises in the choice of a dispatching mechanism for the
virtual instruction set.  A simple virtual machine might
dispatch bytecodes via a case statement, a more complex
one might employ some form of threaded code, and a very
high-performance one might translate bytecodes into
native code dynamically. Each of these alternatives has
indirect complexity, portability, and performance costs.

While investigating such tradeoffs is one theme of this
workshop, we encourage papers about every aspect of
virtual machine implementation including:

- virtual machine design and implementation
  * architectural and design issues in building virtual machines
    for object-oriented languages
  * the impact of processor/memory architecture on performance
  * implementation and optimization techniques

- experiences in building virtual machines
  * using object-oriented technology for building virtual machines,
  * past vs. present: what could we learn from the 1970s and 1980s

- current and future directions in virtual machines
  * embedded virtual machines
  * server virtual machines
  * universal (multi-language) virtual machines

Since there have been a number of excellent OOSPLA workshops
on garbage collection, we would like to gently encourage papers
focusing on other aspects of virtual machine design.


FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP

Potential workshop participants, either teams or individuals,
are invited to submit short papers (2-5 pages) describing
their work on virtual machines.  Electronic submissions in
text form are strongly encouraged.

The papers will be reviewed by the organizers, and a subset
of them will be selected for brief (10 minute) presentation
at the workshop, followed by group discussion. If necessary,
attendance to the workshop will be limited to enable fruitful
discussion.


DEADLINES

Submission deadline: August 16, 1999


CONTACT INFORMATION

Please send all communication and submissions (preferably in
electronic form) to:

  John Maloney
  Walt Disney Imagineering
  P.O. Box 25020
  Glendale, CA 91221-5020
  E-mail: John.Maloney at disney.com
  Fax: +1 650 428-0843
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