The Jalapeño virtual machine

• DOI: 10.1147/sj.391.0211
• Publication Date: 2010-04-05T18:33:53Z
• Authors: B. Alpern; C. R. Attanasio; J. J. Barton; M. G. Burke; P. Cheng; J.-D. Choi; A. Cocchi; S. J. Fink; D. Grove; M. Hind; S. F. Hummel; D. Lieber; V. Litvinov; M. F. Mergen; T. Ngo; J. R. Russell; V. Sarkar; M. J. Serrano; J. C. Shepherd; S. E. Smith; V. C. Sreedhar; H. Srinivasan; J. Whaley
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Jalapeno is a virtual machine for JavaTM servers written in the Java language. To be able to address the requirements of servers (performance and scalability in particular), Jalapeno was designed "from scratch" to be as self-sufficient as possible. Jalapeno'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. Jalapeno's interoperable compilers enable quasi-preemptive thread switching and precise location of object references. Jalapeno's dynamic optimizing compiler is designed to obtain high quality code for methods that are observed to be frequently executed or computationally intensive.