## T3 VM Design Philosophy

The T3 Virtual Machine is largely based on the TADS 2 Virtual Machine. The TADS 2 VM evolved gradually over time, and its internal design was never documented beyond the descriptive information contained in the implementation source code, but a set of underlying principles controlled the VM's design.

For the new machine, we have attempted to formulate and state a set of principles to guide the design. These principles help make choices in the design where trade-offs are involved, where a set of alternatives offers no single option that is superior in all ways to the others, but offers instead a mix of advantages and disadvantages.

### Modular and Open Design

The T3 VM is designed specifically as a program execution subsystem that operates within an enclosing application environment. The VM should not contain any assumptions about the host environment. For example, the VM does not contain any specification of the user input/output system: the VM should operate equally well on a GUI system, on a mainframe connected to a character-mode terminal, and on a network server with no user input/output at all. As far as the VM is concerned, there is no such thing as input/output; this is entirely a matter for the host application environment.

Even though the VM is not itself tied to an application environment, a program written with the T3 VM may be designed to work with a particular host application environment; in fact, most programs will work this way, because most complete application programs need to use the types of services that a host environment provides. However, the VM itself does not have these dependencies; this means that a single implementation of the VM can be incorporated into any number of host applications.

This modularity is achieved in the design through a set of interfaces between the VM and the host environment. These interfaces are meant to be general, open, and extensible, so that the host environment can provide any number of services to programs running under the VM in such a way that the programs can find and use the host services, but that the VM is involved only to the extent that it mediates the requests. These interfaces should make no assumptions about the services, not even about what kinds of services are provided. For example, there is no specific input/output interface; input/output, if present at all, is provided by the host environment using the same generic interfaces that could be used by another host environment to provide graphics services, timekeeping, robotic arm manipulation, network I/O, or anything else the host environment can do.

Note that this may sound complex for the programmer writing a VM program, but the mechanics will be quite simple. The compiler will handle the details of specifying the host application interfaces that a program requires; when the VM loads the program, it uses information stored in the program by the compiler to find the required interfaces. The programmer writing a VM program should be able to use host application services as though they were built in to the language and the VM.

### High-level Operations

When we talk about "high-level" and "low-level" operations, we are talking about the level of abstraction in the operations. For example, consider adding two integers. This is a relatively simple operation, but in fact it can be decomposed into a series of still simpler operations involving the individual bits of the binary representations of the numbers. A computer that provides an instruction to compute the arithmetic sum of two integers is thus providing a higher-level abstraction relative to the actual computation that the machine is performing, which involves the bit-level operations. Integer arithmetic, however, is a very low-level operation in comparison to some of the abstractions in a modern programming language: calling a method in a polymorphic object; throwing an exception; creating a new instance of a class; retrieving a member variable from an object.

Because of the difficulty and cost of creating hardware processors, most real computers operate at a very low level, and implement higher-level abstractions through software. The highest-level abstractions on most of today's computers are integer and floating-point arithmetic; everything more abstract must be built from the primitive operations that the processor provides.

A machine design that is not intended to be implemented in hardware does not have the same obstacles, and can therefore use a much higher-level design. The T3 VM does not attempt to model a hardware computer, but instead seeks to provide high-level operations that model the abstractions used by a modern programming language.

A high-level design has many advantages. A program written in a high-level programming language is much easier to translate to a higher-level machine, assuming the abstractions in the language map reasonably well to the machine design. A program can be more compact and execute faster, because abstractions in the program design can be expressed directly with the high-level primitives of the machine, rather than using multiple simpler operations.

### Memory Model

In keeping with its overall high-level design, the T3 VM does not expose the machine's memory to the programming model as an array of bytes, as most physical computers do. Instead, the T3 VM exposes its memory to programs as collections of values and objects. Programs can address registers, the stack, and "objects," which are typed units of storage.

The T3 machine does not have "pointers" or "addresses" in the untyped sense that most physical computers use; it is therefore not possible to convert an arbitrary integer, for example, into an address for dereferencing. Instead, the machine provides typed references. This is advantageous in that it enforces good program behavior and eliminates a large class of programming errors that arise from invalid conversions between reference types. The VM design seeks to provide enforceably type-safe operations to replace the unsafe address arithmetic, conversion, and dereference operations that program would normally be forced to perform on today's real computers, so there should be no loss of functionality, only increased program integrity.

### Performance and Complexity

In any complex software system, efficiency and complexity are at odds with one another. High-level abstractions allow a program to be expressed in terms that match the problem domain rather than the physical details of the computer; the more closely the abstract model matches the problem to be solved, the simpler the program. But the farther an abstraction is from its underlying implementation, the less efficiently will it use the computer's resources, because the computer must do more work to translate the abstrations into its native operations than it would for a lower-level program.

Furthermore, because any computer has finite resources, different kinds of efficiency are in tension, most obviously memory usage and execution speed. For example, any data can be sorted in "linear" time (an amount of time proportional to the number of items to be sorted); a linear sort algorithm requires so much memory (proportional to the set of all possible items that could appear in the set to be sorted), though, that it's impractical in all but limited special cases, so virtually all sorting in practice uses algorithms that run somewhat more slowly (typically in "n log n" time, proportional to the number of items to be sorted times the logarithm of that number) but that use vastly less memory.

In the T3 VM design, we have tried to strike a balance between efficiency and complexity, but we have favored simplicity where a choice must be made.

Memory usage: The T3 VM attempts to use memory efficiently, but is not miserly where extra efficiency would substantially complicate the design. For example, the machine uses an entire byte per data value to represent the value's type, even though the necessary information could be stored in only four bits; it would be possible to encode data values such that the type information was packed more tightly (for example, two data values could be packed into 9 bytes rather than 10, if the four extra bits in the type field were not wasted), but this would obviously complicate the implementation of many parts of the VM. Another example: the boolean types could be compressed to much smaller representations, but doing so would sacrifice the regularity of the type system.

Given the application domain of the VM, we feel that greater efficiency with memory usage is not warranted. Even if the VM's memory usage for a particular program were cut in half, it would not in practice mean that very many new computers could run the program.

Execution speed: We are willing to accept some amount of complexity in the design for better execution speed, but within limits.

Copyright © 2001, 2006 by Michael J. Roberts.
Revision: September, 2006

TADS 3 Technical Manual
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