Nicolas Geoffray
Gilles Muller
ABSTRACT
Managed Runtime Environments (MREs), such as the JVM and the CLI, form an attractive environment for program execution, by providing portability and safety, via the use of a bytecode language and automatic memory management, as well as good performance, via just-in-time (JIT) compilation. Nevertheless, developing a fully featured MRE, including e.g. a garbage collector and JIT compiler, is a herculean task. As a result, new languages cannot easily take advantage of the benefits of MREs, and it is difficult to experiment with extensions of existing MRE based languages.
This paper describes and evaluates VMKit, a first attempt to build a common substrate that eases the development of high-level MREs. We have successfully used VMKit to build two MREs: a Java Virtual Machine and a Common Language Runtime. We provide an extensive study of the lessons learned in developing this infrastructure, and assess the ease of implementing new MREs or MRE extensions and the resulting performance. In particular, it took one of the authors only one month to develop a Common Language Runtime using VMKit. VMKit furthermore has performance comparableto the well established open source MREs Cacao, Apache Harmony and Mono, and is 1.2 to 3 times slower than JikesRVM on most of the Dacapo benchmarks.
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Index Terms
- VMKit: a substrate for managed runtime environments
Recommendations
VMKit: a substrate for managed runtime environments
VEE '10Managed Runtime Environments (MREs), such as the JVM and the CLI, form an attractive environment for program execution, by providing portability and safety, via the use of a bytecode language and automatic memory management, as well as good performance, ...
Dynamic selection of application-specific garbage collectors
ISMM '04: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory managementMuch prior work has shown that the performance enabled by garbage collection (GC) systems is highly dependent upon the behavior of the application as well as on the available resources. That is, no single GC enables the best performance for all programs ...
An experimental study of the influence of dynamic compiler optimizations on Scala performance
SCALA '13: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on ScalaJava Virtual Machines are optimized for performing well on traditional Java benchmarks, which consist almost exclusively of code generated by the Java source compiler (javac). Code generated by compilers for other languages has not received nearly as ...
Reviews
William M. Waite
A managed runtime environment (MRE) is a particular kind of system that implements an abstract computer on a physical machine. It provides a just-in-time (JIT) compiler to translate abstract machine code to the native code of the underlying machine, and normally supports garbage collection storage management. Common MREs are the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). Ever since its introduction more than 50 years ago [1], one of the drawbacks of this concept is that a single abstract computer cannot do everything well. Thus, new applications may result in new abstractions, requiring new MREs. Geoffray et al. try to simplify the construction of a new MRE. Their approach for VMKit is the standard one: introduce a low-level abstraction with its own JIT compiler and memory manager. To create a new MRE, designers must write a translator from their abstraction to the low-level abstraction and also provide functions that allow the memory manager to extract information about their abstraction's data model. The paper explains the structure of VMKit and how to use it to create a new MRE. Geoffray et al. describe two MREs they built using VMKit: one (J3) implementing the JVM and the other (N3) implementing the .NET CLR. They provide measurements that evaluate the performance of J3 and N3 relative to handmade MREs, for the same abstractions. I found the paper interesting and well written. The measurements support the authors' thesis that VMKit is a viable tool for building prototype MREs for new abstractions. Online Computing Reviews Service
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