A programming language is a user interface to an abstract machine. Designing a new programming language for an existing abstract machine is an important and useful task (e.g. Scala on the JVM, F# on the CLR, etc.), but sometimes we want to design a new abstract machine, perhaps to cope with custom hardware, to provide a new approach to concurrency, or to provide new runtime guarantees to the source language. Let's talk about writing a small-step operational semantics and designing a runtime, using Pony (and a hypothetical extension to the Pony abstract machine) as an example.
Slides: https://pliss2019.github.io/sylvan_clebsch_slides.pdf
Part of PLISS 2019: https://pliss2019.github.io/