Design of an EDISON virtual machine — From a H L L specification to a microprogrammed implementation

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a virtual machine oriented towards the execution of concurrent programs written in the high level language EDISON defined by P. Brinch Hansen in [1] and [2]. The target machine specification includes primitives reflecting typical constructs of source programs. For instance, there are primitives realizing directly those source operations involving array type and set type variables; instructions to create, synchronize, and to kill processes etc. As required by the source language, the virtual machine implements the concept of Conditional Critical Regions [3]. EDISON programs are translated to target code before their actual interpretation. Some virtual machine interpreters were implemented: first we developed two interpreters in high level language; next an interpreter in ASSEMBLY language; and finally we implemented a μ-programmed version of the virtual machine. Some performance figures of the interpretation are included in the appendix.