12mo roadmap · 10 milestones
Runtime — what every runtime has to do
Companion to docs/learning/runtime-roadmap.md. Treats every runtime as doing the same five jobs: execute, allocate, schedule, isolate, observe. Phases cover each job, then deep-dives into language runtimes, AI inference runtimes, and edge runtimes.
Outcome: Build one cross-cutting mental model for V8, JVM, Go, BEAM, .NET CLR, vLLM, SGLang, Cloudflare Workers, and wasmtime.
How to work this roadmap
Treat each milestone as a claim that must be supported by evidence. Before reading, write what you think the mechanism does and where it will fail. After studying the linked concepts, run the drills without copying an answer, preserve the output, and revise the explanation. Move forward when you can connect the milestone goal to a working implementation, benchmark, architecture decision, or reviewable design artifact.
The 12mo horizon is a sequencing aid, not a completion badge. Spend more time where your prediction and the observed behavior disagree. Keep a short decision log containing the mechanism selected, alternatives rejected, expected failure mode, measurement used, and remaining uncertainty. Review that log with FSRS prompts so the roadmap produces durable system judgment rather than a temporary tour of terminology.
At the end, explain Build one cross-cutting mental model for V8, JVM, Go, BEAM, .NET CLR, vLLM, SGLang, Cloudflare Workers, and wasmtime. from first principles to a reader outside the domain. A strong explanation should survive follow-up questions about correctness, cost, latency, resource use, security, recovery, and operational visibility. If it cannot, return to the milestone that contains the missing mechanism and build a smaller falsifiable example.
Milestones
Milestone 1
Prerequisites — unlock the rest of this path
Concepts the later milestones depend on. Without these the planner cannot serve the rest of this roadmap.
Concepts
Milestone 2
Phase 0-1 — Five-job model + execution
Frame what every runtime does. Tier ladders: interpreter, baseline JIT, optimising JIT, deopt.
Concepts
Milestone 3
Phase 2 — Memory & GC
Allocation, escape analysis, generational/concurrent/pauseless collectors, read/write barriers.
Concepts
None assigned yet.
Milestone 4
Phase 3 — Scheduling
Cooperative vs preemptive, async runtimes, fibers, work-stealing, goroutine + BEAM schedulers.
Concepts
Milestone 5
Phase 4 — Isolation
Process, thread, V8 isolate, Wasm sandbox, Firecracker, gVisor.
Concepts
Milestone 6
Phase 5 — Observability & control
Sampling profilers, JFR, async-profiler, Go pprof, eBPF runtime hooks.
Concepts
Milestone 7
Phase 6 — Language runtimes deep-dive
Pick at least one outside your comfort zone: JVM, Go, BEAM, V8, or .NET CLR.
Concepts
None assigned yet.
Milestone 8
Phase 7 — AI inference runtimes
vLLM PagedAttention, SGLang RadixAttention, llama.cpp, TensorRT-LLM, continuous batching.
Concepts
Milestone 9
Phase 8 — Edge & serverless runtimes
Workers, Deno, Bun, wasmtime, Firecracker — cold start, isolate startup, multi-tenant scheduling.
Concepts
Milestone 10
Phase 9 — Synthesis project
Ship one of: cross-runtime benchmark, tier-up JIT, mini paged KV-cache, or isolate sandbox.
Concepts
None assigned yet.