Optimizing Communicating Event-Loop Languages with Truffle

Communicating Event-Loop Languages similar to E and AmbientTalk are recently gaining more traction as a subset of actor languages. With the rise of JavaScript, E’s notion of vats and non-blocking communication based on promises entered the mainstream. For implementations, the combination of dynamic typing, asynchronous message sending, and promise resolution pose new optimization challenges. This paper discusses these challenges and presents initial experiments for a Newspeak implementation based on the Truffle framework. Our implementation is on average 1.65x slower than Java on a set of 14 benchmarks. Initial optimizations improve the performance of asynchronous messages and reduce the cost of encapsulation on microbenchmarks by about 2x. Parallel actor benchmarks further show that the system scales based on the workload characteristics. Thus, we conclude that Truffle is a promising platform also for communicating event-loop languages.