- Compile once, run anywhere for low-level languages like C++. With limitations, of course.
- More debugging capabilities. Maybe it could be used for dynamic analysis. Theoretically it should be possible to change code at runtime.
- Something like Valgrind? Valgrind is really complex and doesn't run on Windows at all. It seems like you could make a portable substitute with this.
- Maybe GraalVM can be used to provide additional memory safety guarantees, not sure.
Kind of hard for me to say because I don't actually know exactly what GraalVM provides, so it's kind of a guess. But it does seem like there are some genuine use cases beyond the neatness of it.
This seems to imply only implementing a C JIT, so my memory may be wrong: http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext
Truffleruby seems to be using Sulong now: https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby/commit/f16a52934437a96...
This is very weird. How can (lack of) optimizations possibly interfere with things like calling conventions? Whatever they're doing, it smells of fragile.
I am trying hard not to get overly excited, let see some real world benchmarks once Truffle is ready to run Real World Rails.
The main use case seems to be speed up dynamic languages (ruby, python, javascript, R), and Sulong is used to handle the C extensions, so that the optimizations can be performed across the language boundaries. Unboxing and inlining mostly in the hot paths. Makes sense. Plus more memory safety than C/C++/Fortran.