How To Make a Fast Dynamic Language Interpreter

Zef's AST-walking interpreter posts a 16.6× speed-up. The gains come from surgical changes: 64-bit tagged values, AST node & RMW specialization, symbol hash-consing, inline caches, and a shaped object model. Developers built it on Fil-C++ and later ported it to Yolo-C++. The Yolo build adds ~4x speed, at the cost of unsound GC behavior. Zef now challenges CPython, Lua, and QuickJS.