The main body of work related to supporting dynamic languages on the JVM at Oracle today is done within the Nashorn project. While on the surface it looks like we're busy creating a JavaScript runtime, in reality JavaScript is only the beginning, and not the ultimate goal. Nashorn has served as the proving ground for new approaches for implementing a dynamic language on top of the JVM, and we're eager to – once solidified – crystallize these into a reusable dynamic language implementer's toolkit. We have faced challenges of optimally mapping JavaScript local variables to JVM types (or: "hey, there's a static type inference algorithm in your dynamic language compiler"), doing liveness analysis, cutting up methods too large to fit into a single JVM method, efficiently representing large array and object literals in compiled code, creating a system for on-demand compilation of several type-specialized variants of the same function, and more. Along the way, we have reached the limits of our initial internal representation (fun fact: you can't do liveness analysis on an AST. We learned it the hard way.) and started sketching up an intermediate representation that would be easy to emit from a dynamic language compiler, and that could be taken over by a toolchain to perform the operations described above then on it and finally output standard Java bytecode for JIT to take over. Elevator pitch: like LLVM, but for dynamic languages on the JVM.