Subject: SUN'S GOSLING PREVIEWS HOTSPOT JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE

From: Dave Brillhart - SMCC SE - Orlando <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 09:18:39 -0500 (EST)

Thought you might be interested in the status/progress of HotSpot.
CYA - this was from a public news bite from Computergram
International - not an official press release from Sun.

Regards,

-- Dave

SUN'S GOSLING PREVIEWS HOTSPOT JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE

Sun Microsystems Inc is getting ready to release its HotSpot faster
Java Virtual Machine technology at next month's JavaOne event, and
Java architect James Gosling gave a preview of what to expect at the
Software Development Show yesterday in San Francisco. HotSpot VM: The
Next Generation, as Gosling billed it, will include more
sophisticated garbage collection, dramatically faster
synchronization, and a behavior driven dynamic compiler, as well as
"lots of room for interesting work", he said. HotSpot was
first talked about last year, at the time Sun acquired Longview
Technology LLC's Animorphic Systems unit, a seven person team of
compiler developers based in Palo Alto (CI No 3,103). The garbage
collector uses the relatively new "train algorithm" which
enables it to release large areas of memory in one block, thus making
the collection of garbage a less disruptive process. "It runs
with bounded collection times that means the system won't ever pause
longer the 3 milliseconds" he said. Faster synchronization will
mean that multi-threaded Java applications should run faster.
Synchronisation has been one of the biggest Java performance
bottlenecks, said Gosling. But, he said "the biggest
rocket-science" comes with the behavior driven dynamic compiler,
which performs optimistic optimizations that make a guess at what's
coming next. Gosling said he'd spent a lot of effort in the original
design efforts for Java on "making sure that it could be
compiled into pretty tight machine code." He said that recent
comparisions between Java Just-in- Time-compiled byte code and C++
was showing performance "pretty much neck and neck." He
predicted that dynamic language compilation techniques would dominate
the next generation of Just-in-Time compilers from third parties, as
well as from Sun. JavaOne takes place in San Francisco from March 24.

-- Dave
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