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Some books that i was pointed to; 1) Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and Processes by Smith and Nair - Seems to be a comprehensive subject ov

Some books that i was pointed to; 1) Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and Processes by Smith and Nair - Seems to be a comprehensive subject overview book. 2) Virtual Machines by Iain Craig - Seems like a more hands-on book with languages and VMs. 3) Virtual Machine Design and Implementation in C/C++ by Bill Blunden - Seems like an hands-on implementation. If somebody who has read any of the above can add some comments that would be helpful to everybody.

kragen 2y ago
I'm not convinced that the subject is narrow enough to overview in a single book. The considerations involved in writing a Nintendo emulator, a hypervisor using VT-x, a conventional multitasking operating system, an interpreter for a new scripting language, a SQL query optimizer, a regular expression matcher, a security monitor for untrusted player code running on a game server, etc., would seem to have very little overlap. But these are all "virtual machines". There's even a stack-based virtual machine in the terminfo format for specifying character-cell terminal escape sequences! In a deep sense, virtual machines are what make computers computers, as we use the term today. Turing's 01936 paper about the Entscheidungsproblem hinged on virtual machines being able to emulate one another.
- rramadass 2y ago
  You are thinking about "Virtual Machines" in a more philosophical/abstract sense. Here the definition is in a much more narrower and conventional sense. Surprisingly i can't find too many books on this subject. The Iain Craig book looks pretty interesting since it seems to link language to the VM, so maybe one can learn both language design and a VM to run it on. Other than the above i can only think of studying "QEMU Internals" for more knowledge - https://airbus-seclab.github.io/qemu_blog/ https://airbus-seclab.github.io/qemu_blog/
  - kragen 2y ago
    I'm mostly talking about the sense of the term used in the title of the article we're commenting on, not a more philosophical sense, though I did draw the connection in my second paragraph. It's hard to get less philosophical than terminfo!

kragen 2y ago

I'm not convinced that the subject is narrow enough to overview in a single book. The considerations involved in writing a Nintendo emulator, a hypervisor using VT-x, a conventional multitasking operating system, an interpreter for a new scripting language, a SQL query optimizer, a regular expression matcher, a security monitor for untrusted player code running on a game server, etc., would seem to have very little overlap. But these are all "virtual machines". There's even a stack-based virtual machine in the terminfo format for specifying character-cell terminal escape sequences! In a deep sense, virtual machines are what make computers computers, as we use the term today. Turing's 01936 paper about the Entscheidungsproblem hinged on virtual machines being able to emulate one another.

rramadass 2y ago
You are thinking about "Virtual Machines" in a more philosophical/abstract sense. Here the definition is in a much more narrower and conventional sense. Surprisingly i can't find too many books on this subject. The Iain Craig book looks pretty interesting since it seems to link language to the VM, so maybe one can learn both language design and a VM to run it on. Other than the above i can only think of studying "QEMU Internals" for more knowledge - https://airbus-seclab.github.io/qemu_blog/ https://airbus-seclab.github.io/qemu_blog/
- kragen 2y ago
  I'm mostly talking about the sense of the term used in the title of the article we're commenting on, not a more philosophical sense, though I did draw the connection in my second paragraph. It's hard to get less philosophical than terminfo!