Engineering a common intermediate representation for the Ovm framework

The Ovm framework is a set of tools and components for building language runtimes. We present the common intermediate representation of this framework and software design patterns used throughout Ovm. One of the main themes in this work has been supporting experimentation with new linguistic constructs and implementation techniques. To this end, Ovm components were designed to be parametric with respect to the instruction set on which they operate and its semantics. We argue that our approach eases the task of writing new components without sacrificing efficiency.