Workshop on Virtual Machines and Language ImplementationsVMIL 2026

Virtual Machines are pervasive in the design and implementation of programming systems. In fact, languages implemented as virtual machines are crucial in the specification, implementation, and deployment of most programming technologies. The VMIL workshop is a forum for researchers and cutting-edge practitioners in language virtual machines, the intermediate languages they use, and related issues.

Highlights

Ahead-of-time Compilation of JavaScript to WebAssembly via Static Type Inference

Chris Fallin

Smaller, Faster, Sharper: Recent Runtime Implementation Lessons

Steve Blackburn

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

The workshop is intended to be welcoming to a wide range of topics and perspectives, covering all areas relevant to the workshop’s theme. Aspects of interest include, but are not limited to:

• design issues in VMs and IRs (e.g. IR design, VM modularity, polyglotism);
• static and dynamic compilation strategies, optimizations, and data representations;
• memory management;
• security considerations;
• concurrency (both internal and user-facing);
• performance engineering;
• tool support and related infrastructure (profiling, debugging, liveness, persistence);
• the experience of VM development (use of high-level languages, bootstrapping and self-hosting, reusability, portability, developer tooling, etc).
• empirical studies on related topics, such as usage patterns, the usability of languages or tools, experimental methodology, or benchmark design.

Submission Categories

We invite high-quality papers in the following two categories:

• Research and experience papers: These submissions should describe work that advances the current state of the art in the above or related areas.
• Work-in-progress or position papers: These papers should document ongoing efforts in an area of interest which have not yet yielded final results, and/or should present and defend the authors’ position on a topic related to the broad area of the workshop.

Additionally, this year, we invite “Experimental Setups” papers in both research and work-in-progress paper categories.

Experimental Setups

As experiments in our field become increasingly challenging due to the growing complexity of software and hardware stacks, we aim to support researchers in preparing their experimental setups, which often demand significant engineering efforts. Therefore, we invite the submission of experimental setups to receive feedback. Such submissions should briefly discuss what the experiments are meant to show and then describe the experimental setup, but should explicitly not discuss any results. We recommend the format of research papers for such submissions.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: If authors intend to submit their papers as experimental setups, please check the relevant checkbox in HotCRP before submitting your paper.

Submissions

Submissions will be judged on novelty, clarity, timeliness, relevance, and potential to stimulate discussion during the workshop. As the review process is double blind, please ensure all author names are redacted when submitting for review.

For the first submission deadline, all paper types are considered for publication in the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL), except if the authors prefer not to be included. Publication of work-in-progress and position papers at VMIL is not intended to preclude later publication elsewhere.

For the second deadline, we will consider only work-in-progress and experimental setup papers. Abstracts do not have to be submitted before the deadline. These will not be published in the ACM DL, and will only appear on the website.

The address of the submission site is: vmil26.hotcrp.com

• Paper Submission: Aug 14, 2026
• Notification: Aug 24, 2026
• Work in Progress (Presentation Only): Aug 24, 2026

All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE), i.e. GMT/UTC−12:00 hour

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks before the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Submission formats

• Research and experience papers: 6-10 pages, double-column, maximum 10pp, excluding references.
• Work-in-progress and position papers: up to 6 pages, double-column, maximum 10pp, but we will consider shorter submissions (e.g. a well-written 2-page abstract).

Please use the SIGPLAN acmart style (sigplan option) for all papers: https://sigplan.org/Resources/Author/#acmart-format. The provided double-column template is available for Latex and Word.