JavaScript is now the most widely supported dynamic programming
language in existence; it is the language that powers the client-side
of the web, and large companies such as Google and Microsoft have
clearly stated their intent to build web applications intended to
replace current desktop software based on this technology. Finding
ways to get better performance out of JavaScript code and to provide
more portable implementations of the language have become foremost
concerns.

The Tachyon project is a research initiative involving the creation of
a meta-circular JavaScript virtual machine. This virtual machine is
meta-circular because it is itself written in JavaScript and intended
to compile and optimize itself just-in-time, along with client code,
to platform-specific machine code. This project was officially started
this year, and while still in early stages, has the potential to offer
researchers a simpler and powerful alternative to explore novel
dynamic language optimization techniques and study the behavior or
dynamic languages.

We intend to use this project to demonstrate the potential performance
and design benefits of meta-circularity, to explore novel optimization
techniques based on dynamic analysis, dynamic recompilation and
on-stack replacement and to experiment with the idea of a virtual
machine capable of serializing its own state. We plan to integrate
Tachyon in a real web browser so as to test and demonstrate its
capabilities in real-world situations, on non-synthetic JavaScript
code. We further intend to make our system open source and available
to other researchers.