Co-founder of Webassembly Ben Titzer discussed his plans for the development of his own programming language, Virgil.
Currently, Titzer leads the Webassembly research center at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he is the main researcher in the systems department. The center focuses on advancing Webassembly research in academia, educating students, and supporting the integration of Webassembly in new areas.
Aside from his university duties, Titzer actively works on his programming language Virgil and the virtual machine Wizard, which can alter software execution methods. Recently, Titzer shared insights about his projects in an interview on the Microarch Club YouTube channel, where he discussed his accomplishments with host and Golioth engineer, Dan Magnum.
Titzer’s interest in programming began in school, where he developed an interpreter for his own byte code in X86 assembler. During his student years, Titzer envisioned creating a new programming language, which he named Virgil.
Virgil is a language tailored for lightweight, high-performance systems. The language compiler produces quick native executables, Webassembly modules, or JVM Jar files.
In interviews, Titzer expressed his goal of making Virgil a top-tier system programming language that integrates modern features while discarding outdated elements. He believes that Virgil offers capabilities that Rust lacks and deems it ideal for crafting virtual machines, compilers, operating system kernels, and network protocols.