January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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2
The Blurred Lines Between Native Code, Virtual Machines, and Interpreters
In this chapter, we will explore how the distinction between programming language execution models—native code, virtual machines, and interpreters—driven by runtime modeling, is becoming increasingly blurred. Specifically, these are the topics we will cover:
- Modern computer instruction set architectures (ISAs) can no longer simply be mapped to concrete operations in hardware
- How interpreters also function as models of a specific virtual machine
- Reasoning about the effects of abstracting away complexity and the overhead those abstractions create
- How just-in-time (JIT) compilers change the way we think about the performance of interpreted languages
- And finally, how to ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.