activesupport wants to give this talkVirtual Machines: Down the Rabbit Hole
For the past two years I've been studying compilers and virtual machines, developing some simple compilers in Ruby, programming languages on the Rubinius VM, and working on my own language-agnostic virtual machine, the Terror VM.
This talk will cover what I've learned during this enlightening process, how a Virtual Machine works, and most importantly why you (as a Ruby programmer) should care about it. I'll also guide the audience through the implementation of a very simple VM in Ruby, to show that there are less dragons than you might think.