Syslets and other untrusted kernelspace programming

In the wake of creating true async. IO in the linux kernel Ingo worked on so called syslets. A syslet is nothing more than one async system call to chain together a few arbitrary system calls. An example syslet would be:

1. Read from file descriptor 123
2. If 1 returned with error, break
3. Write which was read to file descriptor 321
4. If 3 succeeded jump to 1 otherwise break

This is represented by a few struct’s linked together of which the first is passed on to the kernel with the syslet system call. The systemcall returns practically directly and eventually the application can be notified (or can wait) on the syslet to complete. This could safe an enormous amount of system calls. This means way less context switches, which is very good for performance.

Syslets dawn, in a very primitive manner, kernelspace scripting. But hey, wasn’t kernelside scripting the thing that all linux dev’s dreaded? Wasn’t it Linus who joked that he would be in a mental institute whilst releasing Linux 3 with a VB message pump? Yes, they’re afraid of putting untrusted programs/scripts in kernelspace and they’ll barely acknowledge that syslets is the first step.

The problem with the current full-featured scripting languages is that they are, well, full-features gone wrong: they’re bloated and not really secure. In kernelspace you can’t allow any memory except for the scripts’ own to be accessed, not to mention the restrictions on resources and virtual memory won’t help you there. Most scripting languages weren’t developed with these restrictions in mind. Most languages have got evil functions in dark corners of the standard library that will allow you to do really evil stuff with memory.

As far as I know only .net (thus mono) have got a quite rigorous trust framework build in. .Net is bloated and proprietary and Mono is still (and probably will never be) feature complete though still being very bloated.

A very simple safe language is what we need, of which a compiler daemon is running as a system service, with which untrusted userspace programs can have scripts running in the kernel. I’m tempted to use one of the brainf*ck JIT’s, they’re small enough to thoroughly review :).

A kernelspace interpreter would do to, though, as a PoC.

Typed Yields: Non fatal exceptions

Wouldn’t it be nice to have:

begin {
&nsbr;LoadTheDatabase("foo.bar");
} rescue (Exception e) {
print "Fatal exception happened: ", e
} on (Warning w) {
print "Database Warning: ", w
} on (Message m) {
print "Database Message: ", m
}

The rescue (Exception e) should be familiar with everyone — something failed, maybe the database file was corrupted very bad, and raised an exception and the rescue block will be executed.

But what if the database has a small error, or something is only a little bit out of place. You wouldn’t want to just ignore it, but warn about it. Usually one would implement a ‘Logger’ class to which a function can log certain events, but that is ugly and inconvenient.

Enter non fatal exceptions. Basically there would be two ways to raise an exception, fatal like we all know it, and non fatal. When the on block for a non fatal exception has been executed, control will be returned to the function in which the raise was called.

This is done in about the same ways as a lot of languages implement yield. But this time the handling code depends on the type of the yielded object.

As far as Kaja and I concern this will be a feature of Paradox.

Thanks go to Bram for the idea.

The GC: Tracing, reversing pointer to object

The problem

Whilest tracing down garbage during the Garbage Collection, as described in earlier posts, it is required to find mark an object pointed to from another object.

This could lead to problems when it is allowed to point anywhere inside an object, or when the object information bit can’t be found by a pointer to the start of the object.

In both cases the Gc should somehow translate a pointer (eg. 0x1234) to the head of the object it points in (eg. 0x1200). The problem here is how to efficiently get 0x1200 from 0x1234.

Avoiding the problem

This problem can be circumvented by disallowing pointers pointing to inside the object and instead require all pointers to point to the start of the object. This will only work when the header of the object has a fixed size, otherwise it will still be impossible to work back to the start of the header, which contains the flags you want to alter when tracing garbage.

Pointers inside a managed object aren’t required and could easily be removed. They can be very usefull though in some situations. One of these situations is being able to inline a private referenced instance into the contained class, of which is known that it won’t be modified, which would result in pointers inside the container class. It will only increase performance in some situations, but it will be usefull to have, and is optional.

A bigger issue are pointers that point to the start of an object with a header in front of it which has got a dynamic size. Either the header shouldn’t be of dynamic size, and a fixed (big) size, or instead of to the start of the object, pointers should point to the header of an object. In the latter case each pointer derefence should require an ‘add’ call to increase the address to match the start of the object, with the additional logic required to attain the size of the header which can be significant depending on the implementation. These extra opcodes for each pointer derefence could not be easily be worked away even when using a JIT because of multi-threading, and certainly could not be avoided when using C. The fixed header size isn’t nice either. For it probably would end up being at least 7 bytes on a 64bit platform (flags + pointer).

Oh, and there is also the java way which uses a handle for each object. Which basicly means that an integer pointer isn’t int*, but int** in java. Where the pointer in between contains the meta-data about the object. This is even more less ideal for it requires an extra derefence for each derefence and it results in twice the amount of pointers to track.

As far as I concern this problem can’t be avoided, when dealing with a Gc that is required to interop with non-managed code. With a JIT it could be done though, but this requires a runtime performance/garbage collection performance trade-off. And I personally like a bit slower garbage collect instead of slower runtime.

Look-up structure

Before tracing the garbage collection usually walks through the heap to mark all objects white and put those in the root-set in the gray-list. During this first walk through the heap a temporary look-up structure could be build to allow efficient look-up during trace.

When only allowing pointers to the start of the object it would be rather easy to do. A modulus-based bucket like implementation, a hash table without the hash-part, would do. This would allow a nice even redistribution of entries throughout the table, for it uses a modulus.

When allowing pointers in the middle of an object it becomes more tricky, because you can’t precompute the pointers to put in the table. You need to have a structure which allows you to look to the left and find the object the pointer points into. Although most pointers still point to the start of the object, the case that they could point inside the object shouldn’t be concidered.

Instead of a modulus-based bucket, division-based buckets should be used. This creates a problem for the likely distribution of blocks between the buckets will vary heavily. One whole bucket could be empty when there is a big allocation in the memory it represents, where almost all small objects which represent most of the pointers could be concentrated in just two buckets.

Bucket-tree

To compensate for this a bucket-tree could be used. Basicly when a bucket contains a lot of elements it would split itself in a new set of buckets. This way a minimal amount of buckets could be wasted on really big allocations, and a lot of buckets could be allocated for small allocations. The look-up time would be a bit worse, but it would be neglectable to the huge lookup time a normal search through the heap would require.

Special treatment for pointers pointing inside objects

When there are only a one or two pointers in the whole heap that point inside another object they could be treated seperately instead, and the rest could keep using the modulus-based buckets.

One way to give those pointers a special treatment is marking them, and resolving to which object they point during the initial walk through the heap where finding objects pointed to from pointers is a lot easier. (pointers needed to be looked up could be sorted by address, and be checked during the walk, which is very efficient).

Another way would be to simulate pointers pointing inside another pointer by making the pointer consist out of an object pointer and a offset from there, which could be cached by the JIT, or expanded before the garbage collection.

Yet another way would be to walk the modulus-based buckets by hand when the pointer isn’t found.

The best method would depend on the implementation of the rest of the Gc.

About modulus-based buckets

I`m still uncertain about whether the distribution in a modulus-based bucket can be trusted at all times. Putting a bucket-tree in default, for worst case would be nice, just to be sure.

Update: some more possibilities:

Binary search

When we put pointers to all allocated blocks sorted somewhere in the memory, one could use binary search, or other search algorithms to search in sorted lists, to find the pointer. When adding shortcuts each ~64K this could be quite efficient. I’ve implemented this method for my Garbage Collector temporarily for it is amongst the easier to implement and I suspect the fastest. Actually, I hope it is the fastest.

I’ll do some tests on different algorithms on a dump of a ‘modal’ application’s managed heap, when I’ve finished the Gc sufficiently to make an application work with it.

The GC: Concurrency

The tracing Gc`s (see previous posts) biggest disadvantage is the unpredictability of the garbage collection. It can happen anytime and the time it takes varies. This while normal execution is halted, can cause serious problems to certain applications which are required to have a low latency.

Incremental Gc

One trick to improve the latency of the gc is to make the garbage collection incremental. Instead of doing everything in one big garbage collection, tiny chunks of execution are interchanged with garbage collection.

Generations

When using a generations gc, a garbage collector which groups objects by their age, garbage collection could be done on each seperate generation. Objects that have survived a few collections, and settle in older generations, tend to remain persistent. (those are the objects that remain global during the duration of the program). Therefore the older generations don’t need a lot of garbage collections. Whereas the youngest collections typically contain a lot of garbage and require frequent garbage collections.

Granularity

Very much small garbage collections could have worse performance than one big garbage collection. Although very big garbage collections which are very infrequent are really bad for latency. When it gets extreme there even could be 100MB allocated memory for 1MB used memory at a moment, because garbage isn’t collected frequently enough. Having a lot of garbage between live data also gets in the way of locality of reference (used memory close together gets all in one load of the L2-cache which is a lot faster than normal RAM).

Although a figure like 100MB sounds ridiculous, take for instance a program that reads through a text file and print every line:

while there-is-a-new-line
   string line = get-line-from-file
   print line
end

Every line read would go on the heap as a string. After the line string goes out of scope it becomes unreferenced from the stack (part of the root-set) and therefore garbage. When reading a big file the heap fills up pretty fast. When doing another similar operations but then from the lot faster memory than file it could even get worse.

When doing a lot of garbage collects small pieces of memory are copied each time over short distances, which is less efficient than bigger pieces, but having to copy pieces over a very great distance, which doesn’t fit in the L2-cache really slows down instead of speeding up.

Trace-only garbage collections

When a lot of memory is allocated in a short time the garbage collector could get suspicious and fire away a full collection, which could be a waste of time when all allocated memory seems to still be live. Moving memory, marking freespaces and updating pointers takes most time of the whole garbage collection. When only tracing what is garbage and what isn’t and after that deciding what to do could provide a gain in performance.

Not only does tracing down garbage take less time, it also is easier to do while the rest of the program is running.

Internal data garbage collections

Most gc’s keep internal data structures optimized for quick access and modification for thing like tracking types, freeblocks, blocks, unmanaged pointers and others. An example could be a list which contains the pointers to unmanaged pointers to be able to link into managed memory from unmanaged memory. This list would be accessed a lot when in unmanaged code, which requires all pointers on its unmanaged stack to be registered on that list.

A chained-block stack would perform best. The whole stack contains out of a few chained blocks, where the last block is pointed to from the stack structure, which on itself points to the previous block, and so on all the way to the first block. Adding a pointer-pointer to the stack would be as easy as increment the pointer count, and put it in the last block. And possibly creating a new block when the current block is full.

Removing a pointer-pointer would work best by searching from end to begin for the pointer and simply NULL-ing it. This for the most frequent use for the stack-list would be for registering pointers from the unmanaged stack and deregistering them afterwards. Although when another global unmanaged pointer is registered there could be a few block registered for the stack, where only the very last contains that one single pointer-pointer to that global pointer which won’t be deregistered soon.

The algorithm could be changed to compact on every operation, or to track freespaces in the stack-list, but it can be done a lot easier. Simply collection the garbage and compacting the stack-list would work just as well.

It would be tempting to perform these garbage collections for internal structures during the normal garbage collection, but this would hurt latency. Instead scheduling them somewhere in between would be best.

Concurrency

When a garbage collection is in progress all other threads are usually stopped to avoid the program itself (the mutator) to change memory and corrupting the managed heap. Although it is possible to make most parts of the garbage collection concurrent with normal application execution.

Tracing

When a pointer is changed during tracing down garbage in an object which already is black (all pointers in the object have been checked), the object pointer to will remain white (no black object seems to point to it) and will be scheduled for garbage collection.

This condition is rare, but it could happen, and it could be fatal. Other conditions like an allocation during trace could be easily solved by marking the object black when allocated.

Write barrier

An easy way to cope with these conditions is to detect any reading or writing to pointers that already are marked black, and acting upon this. This is called a write barrier.

The problem with a write barrier is that it is very hard to implement for languages like C, and cause a performance hit, for each pointer-derefence+write would require a few extra opcodes, and would be in most cases unacceptible. When you are dealing with a JIT-ed language (Just In Time compiled) however, you can emit these extra opcodes to detect writes into the black objects only when a Gc is in progress.

Compacting and Pointer change

After garbage has been traced down it is time for the gc to compact the memory by moving live objects in freed garbage, and changing pointers to these objects accordingly. When traced the gc already would have made a translation table for pointers (usually offset based for efficiency) and would walk its way through the heap compacting and changing pointers in one go.

When the application is running at that time it would encounter problems when reading dereferencing pointers.

Read barrier

To combat this a read barrier would be required. Which is the same as a write barrier, but then for normal pointer-dereferencing. This too requires opcodes to be added on each dereferencing, which would be easy for a JIT and unacceptible for C. The added opcodes would simply look to the place where the garbage collection is at the moment, and convert the pointer as if it was the Gc itself using the Gc’s translation table.

Concurrency outside collection

Making a Gc work concurrent outside a garbage collection is relatively easy for no really collection is happening at runtime and a few rw-locks would do the trick.

Conclusion

Concurrency in a Gc is a must for some applications, and generally a good idea anyway. A better latency can be gained from a fine-coarsed incremental garbage collections. Real concurrency can be gained by using read and write barriers to allow execution during the garbage collection, which is only feasible when working with a JIT.

The GC: Tracing Garbage

Most Garbage Collectors are tracing. Instead of using Reference Counting, they trace down unused objects (garbage) by tracing from the root set of objects and mark all objects found. Those who weren’t marked have to garbage.

The Root-set

The root-set are all objects that are definitely live objects. The root set typically consists out of the objects linked from the stack and registers of each thread. Also object vital to the Gc and globals are in the root-set.

Tri-Color algorithm

An easy way to represent tracing through objects is the tri-color method. There are three colors an object can have: white, gray and black. All white objects haven’t seem to be referenced yet from black objects which are sure to be non-garbage. The gray objects are those that are referenced by black objects but didn’t have all of their references checked. Sounds confusing? A more practical explanation:

  1. Colour all objects white.
  2. Colour the root-set objects gray.
  3. (Repeat this as long as there are gray coloured objects) Pick a gray object. Colour all objects referenced to from that gray object gray too. (Except those who are black). And colour itself black.
  4. All black objects are now reachable, and all white objects are unreachable. Free those that are white!

Pop-mark-push referenced

An implementation of the Tri-Color algorithm can be accomplished by putting a mark on each object which either can be 1 or 0. 1 representing a black object, and 0 representing a white object. A stack list can be used to keep track of the gray objects:

NB do not confuse this stack, which is a normal Last In First Out list with the call stack.

  1. Mark all objects 0 (white).
  2. Push all objects in the root-set on the gray-stack.
  3. (while there are objects in the gray-stack) Pop an object from the gray-stack. Mark it 1 (black) and push all referenced objects from that object on the gray-stack that aren’t marked 1 (thus white).
  4. All objects still marked 0 (white) can be freed rid of.

Generations

Studies have shown that in almost all applications most allocations have a lifetime less than a few miliseconds, although the rest of the allocations would have a far greater lifespan. When collecting every few miliseconds would cause unnesessary tracing through the long living objects which would still take up most of the memory, and when collecting every few seconds the uncollected short-lifed objects would have spammed the heap and would make the garbage collector locality-of-reference unfriendly (everything worked on wouldn’t fit in one l2-cache load and therefore would be a lot slower).

The older objects which are in comparison with the newer objects highly unlikely to be garbage could be searched less frequently. This could be done by seperating the heap into generations. Each generation is basicly a piece of the heap. A typical garbage collection would only target the youngest few generation. Everytime an object survives a garbage collection it’s moved into an older generation, and finally becomes part of the oldest generation that is only garbage collected very infrequently.

Unpredictable garbage collection duration

The duration of the garbage collections would be hard to predict and could vary a lot. Although generation based gc’s could increase the amount of garbage collections and decrease the total time in comparison with one big, applications that use a garbage collection can not guarentee (practically) uninterupted execution.

Advantages

  • No extra fields required to keep track of the reference count.
  • There hasn’t got to be registration of references to objects, cause the gc keeps traces those down.
  • Hasn’t got any problem with circular references.
  • Outperforms reference Gc. The registration for each reference in the reference counter Gc takes more time than tracing down that reference. And it doesn’t do unnesessary checking of older objects when generations are kept in mind.

Disadvantages

  • Way harder to implement.
  • All pointers inside an object should be known.
  • Worse latency than reference counter. Although it outperforms refcounter, a garbage collects usually requires the whole program to be halted, which is a really bad thing for some applications.

Conclusion

Tracing gc‘s have shown to easily outperform reference counter gc‘s. The prerequeste to know all pointers in an object can be solved easily for interpreted and jit-ted languages using the gc and can also be managed even in C with effort. The real problem remains the arbitrary and unpredictable length of garbage collections. There are ways to make tracing gc’s have a better latency, which I`ll discuss in coming posts.

The GC: As A Managed Memory Allocator

Most Garbage Collectors aren’t limited to just tracing the garbage (unused objects) and scheduling it for deletion, but also manage memory as a whole including allocating it.

Data segment

The kernel of an Operating System takes care of mapping physical memory (RAM/Swap memory/IO memory/Cache’s) to virtual memory available to a process. A process is allocated a few segment’s of memory. The one that is important to memory allocators is the Data Segment.

The Data Segment is the segment which contains memory which is used for random access by the program. The size of the Data Segment can be changed using the sbrk or brk C function, which asks the kernel for more memory to be mapped for the process, which then returns a pointer to the start of the newly allocated space. (providing a negative value will result in decreasing the data segment size).

Malloc

A non-Gc memory manager/allocator are malloc and its friends. Malloc uses sbrk to obtain memory for the Data Segment to allocate memory from as almost all other allocators. It prefixes and suffixes all blocks of free or allocated memory by size fields so it can walk through the whole heap. It puts in each freeblock a pointer to the next and previous freeblock, which makes freeblocks easy to insert and find.

Freeing a block is simply adding into the freeblock chain and setting a bit to flag it is a free block. Allocating a block is simply walking the freeblock chain until a freeblock is found that can hold the required size, and adds new size’s and flags to the new freeblock and updates the pointers one block previous and next into the freeblock chain to match the new offset of the freeblock.

The big problem with malloc is fragmentation. sbrk could be required to be called to enlarge the heap size to create a freeblock big enough for the allocation although there is enough freespace for that allocation, which is scattered and not contiguous.

Modern implementations of malloc feature tricks to prefer perfect fits and automaticly coalesce freeblocks to create bigger blocks, which all makes malloc a whole lot slower than it should be with still quite a lot of memory fragmentation.

Gc managed pointers and malloc

Most Gc’s implement their own memory allocator routines instead of using malloc, usually even overriding the old malloc. This is because Gc’s usually know more about the requirements of the application than malloc itself.

It gets even better when the Gc knows all pointers to the managed heap. In this case a Gc could decide to move an object, update the pointers that linked to it, and save a lot of space from fragmentation. This is easily implemented when dealing with a interpreted language which uses a Gc for it knows all types runtime. It even can be done in C, but that requires all pointers both inside as outside the managed heap that point into the managed heap to be registered.

The difficult part is to find all pointers pointing to a certain object. This usually requires the whole heap to be walked, once or twice. Waiting until a reasonable amount of objects would be subject to move, and then doing one big move of all those objects, and possibly other operations requiring heap walks while doing it anyway as one big “garbage collection” would be way more efficient than doing this all ‘live’. In the first pass each object subject to move could be tagged with the new location and on the second pass all pointers would be checked and adjusted accordingly.

Unmanaged code interop

The big problem of being able to move managed memory is keeping track of all pointers into the managed memory. If you would want to store a file handle in managed memory you would have a hard time when the internals of file access keep contain pointers to your file handle.

Fixed allocations, which remain stationary would solve the issue but this could, sadly enough, result in fragmentation of your heap. When all objects can be moved it is very easy to move, but when there are fixed objects somewhere in the heap, complicated ‘fitting’ algorithms must be used which decrease performance.

Fixing memory temporarily, or preventing a GC temporarily is a much cleaner solution to the problem. In some cases this just isn’t possible and big blocks with their own malloc style allocator could be used to handle unmanaged memory so that it won’t interfere too much with the normal managed memeory. On most *nix systems mmap could be used to map additional usable memory to the virtual memory space of the process. Which is slower than bsrk and create some extra overhead, but it will avoid fragmentation in managed heap due to fixed blocks.

When

It is only usefull for a Gc to implement its own malloc when it can move its objects, or when there is a clear advantage to implementing the malloc close to the Gc, which could be for instance to more easily walk through all objects in the heap without having to implement a walk algorithm for each malloc used accross different platforms.

The GC: Reference Counter

The simplest form of Garbage Collector is the Reference Counter Garbage Collector.

Each time an object is referenced (a pointer to it is made) the reference count on the object is incremented. If the pointer isn’t used anymore the reference count is decreased. If the reference count hits 0 the object will be freed.

Python uses a Reference Counter.

Advantages

  • A reference counter does its tracking at runtime. There is no big garbage collection, and the execution of the program won’t be interupted for a while when the garbage is collected.
  • It’s very easy to implement.

Disadvantages

  • Instead of the required malloc free pair required for each allocation without Gc, it now requires add_ref free_ref for each pointer/reference to an allocation. When someone forgets to release its reference the object persists.
  • Circular references will never be collected. An example of a circular reference is a list that contains as an item a reference to itself. When the list is released its count will remain 1 because inside the list it refers to itself and will therefore never be collected.
  • A RefCounter GC doesn’t keep track of pointers into the managed heap, and therefore can’t move any object because it`ll break pointers. This makes the fragmentation of the RefCounter GC as bad as malloc‘s fragmentation.

Circular references

Circular references can be fixed by adding a trace algorithm. This algorithm will trace through all objects from the root objects (pointers on the stack, etc.) and mark them. The objects that aren’t marked aren’t accessible and therefore are subject to Garbage Collection.

The problem is that a RefCounter Gc usually doesn’t keep track of what pointers are in objects, and that there could be pointers outside the managed heap which only use the add_ref and free_ref. Python struggled with this problem and it implemented the a trace algorithm that depended on the programmer’s of not-python-modules (of which pointers aren’t known) to implement the list of references to objects that also contain objects. By traversing links that way circular dependencies could be found without hurting unmanaged pointers, but this has a high performance hit on Python, and it is still adviced to avoid circular references.

Conclusion

RefCounter Gc’s are easy to implement, and a good idea for scripting languages which know all references so that circular references can be dealt with accoringly. But they still have a lot of disadvantages which other kinds of Gc’s solve a lot better, and more elegantly.

The GC: Introduction

I’ve been working on Garbage Collectors recently, and I`ll share some of my experiences with them with you on my blog.

First off, what is a Garbage Collector?

A Garbage Collector, a.k.a GC is an algorithm that keeps track of your objects in the memory and gets rid of objects that aren’t used (referenced to) anymore, a.k.a garbage collecting. This can only be accomplished when the GC knows all pointers to the objects managed (objects on the managed part of the heap). And they are therefore almost always used with an interpreted/jit-ted language, like Java, Python or C#.

Since the first GC’s (reference counters) they have gained a lot more responsibility and perform a lot more tasks, where collecting the garbage is just one of the things they do.

I`ll discuss the various kinds and aspects of Garbage Collectors with their advantages and disadvantages in coming blog posts.

You can read all articles about the gc in its category.

Extending using Wrapping

Ever had a problem, not being able to add more functionality to an existing class? Some languages seem to support adding functionality to an existing class but it does make it less secure and leaves a lot of dangers of maluse.

A solution could be to create a new class which inherits the original class although it can only be instanciated using a cast from an instance of the original class or instanciating providing the original instance. Also it won’t be able to override anything otherwise it couldn’t act as its base object.

A possible implementation of this idea could be:

wrapper Int_IsOdd : int {
  public bool IsOdd() {
    return this % 2;
  }
}

And it could be used in several ways:

int myInt = 100;
print ((Int_IsOdd)myInt).IsOdd();
print myInt.IsOdd();
print new Int_IsOdd(myInt).IsOdd();

The first way would be the easiest for both a reader which isn’t familiar with the extension and for the compiler to guess errors. The second would be neat to use but it would be confusing for people that cannot access the rest of the source or do not know what function is meant. The third way would be very compatible.

I wondered by myself whether normal inheritance could provide this functionality.. and it does. The only problem is that polyforism only works up and not down as the wrapper requires. (when you got a class a and b inherits of a, you can with inheritance treat an instance of b as a but you cant treat an instance of a as b which is required for the wrapper)

Also a wrapper would be more cached and not really a new instance as suggested by the way it seems to work and can already be slightly implemented in existing languages.

Maybe it’ll be put in paradox.

update – I talked with Kaja, and it will most likely be a feature of paradox

Introducing Paradox

Kaja Fumei and I are currently developing a light-weight rich jit-ed language called Paradox.

The main feature of Paradox will be that it will be very light weight in memory and startup time.

It will be great to use for scripting in other applications which demand high performance like for instance games. Also for normal scripting purposes or normal applications it will be way more suitable than normal interpreted languages.

Basicly it will feature a JIT Compiler, Generation GC, rich (modulair) base library and a being very extensible.

It will probably not perform as good as the .net framework but will rather come in the range of mono`s and java`s performance, which is very high compared to the performance of normal scripts.

When Kaja, who is currently working on the JITc and gGC finished the base I’ll start working on the core library and help optimizing and I will post a preview of its capabilities.

(for those wondering how long it will take:

The Unknown – 森の中に木がない。 says:
reeally long week

)