The disconnect between programming languages and the developer tools needed to make them useful has grown wide since the days of programming systems with integral tool support, such as Self (1989), Smalltalk (1980), and Lisp (1965). Tools now are typically an afterthought: expensive to develop, delivered late if ever, and arrive with undesirable performance trade-offs.

Michael Van De Vanter is a researcher at Oracle Labs in Redwood Shores, CA. His current project is to ensure that the high-performance language implementations made possible by the Truffle/Graal platform are accompanied by tools, such as debuggers, profilers, and others, with minimal extra development effort. He was previously author of the Maxine Inspector, a combination debugger and visual heap inspector for the Maxine Research VM, and before that Principal Investigator of the Jackpot project at Sun Microsystems Labs.