The Newspeak language had a strong influence on Grace’s language design. But is a Newspeak interpreter a good starting point for a Grace implementation?

Truffle is a framework for interpreter implementation and leverages the Graal just-in-time (JIT) compiler to offer state-of-the-art performance to dynamic languages. But does it fulfill the promise, and at which cost?

This talk is a review of about two years of work on a Grace implementation based on SOMns called Moth. What did we achieve? How compliant is Moth with the specification? How well did Newspeak match with Grace? And does Truffle live up to the promise?