2000•IBM Systems JournalRequires access
The Jalapeño virtual machine
Bowen Alpern, Clement R. Attanasio, John J. Barton, Michael Burke, Pau-Chen Cheng, Jong-Min Choi, Anthony Cocchi, Stephen J. Fink, David Grove, Michael Hind, Susan Flynn Hummel, Derek Lieber, Vassily Litvinov, Mark F. Mergen, The-Anh Ngo, James R. Russell, Vivek Sarkar, Mauricio J. Serrano, Janice C. Shepherd, S. E. Smith, Vugranam C. Sreedhar, Harini Srinivasan, John H. Whaley
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Abstract
Jalapeño is a virtual machine for Java™ servers written in the Java language. To be able to address the requirements of servers (performance and scalability in particular), Jalapeño was designed “from scratch“ to be as self-sufficient as possible. Jalapeño's unique object model and memory layout allows a hardware null-pointer check as well as fast access to array elements, fields, and methods. Run-time services conventionally provided in native code are implemented primarily in Java. Java threads are multiplexed by virtual processors (implemented as operating system threads). A family of concurrent object allocators and parallel type-accurate garbage collectors is supported. Jalapeño's interoperable compilers enable quasi-preemptive thread switching and precise location of object references. Jalapeño's dynamic optimizing compiler is designed to obtain high quality code for methods that are observed to be frequently executed or computationally intensive.