Most of the signifcant dynamically typed languages were developed from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. Computers of the time were relatively slow and had small memories, so the only widely used dynamically-typed languages (Smalltalk and various Lisps) fell out of favour. C++ was created around this time to provide the object-oriented model from Smalltalk and Objective-C in a compiled language. Even 10 years later, Java was initially too slow, because machines were too anemic and virtual machines had not been optimized. Since then Python, Ruby, and Javascript have joined the dynamic pantheon, with Python and Javascript two of the three most popular languages by some measures.

Many things have changed on the hardware and implementation level as well, and it’s time to take stock. There are many aspects of the implementations of these dynamic languages that could usefully be shared. There are even more aspects that could be shared among the Object-Oriented languages. By sharing, all could benefit from each others’ research and technologies.

While many of these languages have some implementations with better performance and Graal provides one approach to generating implementations, we believe a runtime/VM toolkit has value.

This is a work in progress report.