Truffle based .NET IL interpreter and compiler: run C# on Java Virtual Machine

Traditionally, to achieve high performance for executing dynamic languages, a hand-crafted Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler was necessary. Such compilers come with several disadvantages, including security issues arising from bugs in manual speculative optimizations. Our work focuses on the issue that these state-of-the- art projects can be prohibitively complicated for students, academics and hob- byists interested in programming language design and implementation. A novel project, the Truffle Language Implementation Framework, uses partial evalua- tion to convert interpreter-style code into an optimizing compiler. Authors pro- pose that the reduced complexity for implementing languages Truffle offers will allow more languages to benefit from high performance compilation. To validate this claim, we implement BACIL, a Truffle-based runtime for .NET (CLI). While built in an academic setting with inherently limited resources, its peak perfor- mance achieves under 10 times slowdown compared to .NET's official runtime. We release the implementation as open-source with the hope it can further pro- mote experimentation with programming languages