I should add the K project page can be found at https://code.google.com/p/k-framework/ and the semantics of C in K (mentioned in the talk) can be found at http://code.google.com/p/c-semantics/ .
I am not sure TAL is very closely related to K, term rewriting, or matching logic.
K could handle language abstractions as long as they too were given semantics.
The closest thing I think to your last point is that implementation-defined behavior in C is configurable. This would be things like different sized ints or pointers. There is a small amount of work on speeding up formal interpreters (http://hdl.handle.net/2142/17444) but the focus hasn't been on performance yet.
I am not sure TAL is very closely related to K, term rewriting, or matching logic.
K could handle language abstractions as long as they too were given semantics.
The closest thing I think to your last point is that implementation-defined behavior in C is configurable. This would be things like different sized ints or pointers. There is a small amount of work on speeding up formal interpreters (http://hdl.handle.net/2142/17444) but the focus hasn't been on performance yet.
posted by Chucky Ellison