From Maxwell over Maxine to Graal VM, SubstrateVM and Truffle

An airhacks.fm conversation with Thomas Wuerthinger (@thomaswue)
about: Working on HotSpot, Sun started collaboration with Johannes
Kepler University (JKU) in Linz, Java HotSpot is written in C++,
"Array Bounds Check Elimination" for Java HotSpot Compiler,
increased the performance by approx. 10%, the possibly most
impactful student work ever, IdealGraphVisualizer (IGV): the
graphical visualisation tool for HotSpot uses NetBeans visual
library, IGV is also used for GraalVM, the Maxine Research VM at
Sun Microsystems, Project Maxwell was renamed to Maxine, working at
Sun's Menlo Park at Maxine, the circular optimization of Java leads
to higher performance, the relation between Maxine and GraalVM,
replacing the Maxine Compiler with Client HotSpot Compiler
"transpiled" from C++ to Java, the C1X compiler, maxine was too
ambitious, GraalVM just focusses on the compiler and makes it
available for HotSpot, the Java compiler (javac) is written in
Java, the quality of the JIT output is the first factor for good
performance, HotSpot asks JIT to optimize "hot" methods, Maxine
project is stil active, JVMCI, working on crankshaft compiler at
Google with a team of 8 people, using Graal as polyglot
environment, converting JavaScript to GraalIR was too complex,
JavaScript is dynamic and GraalIR is typed, partial evaluation was
inspired by PyPy, JavaScript interpreter was written in Java and is
optimized by GraalVM, the frozen interpreters, the meta-circularity
comes with the native image, a small JavaScript interpreter team
implements recent JavaScript features, improving serverside ReactJS
rendering performance with GraalVM, R, Ruby and Python are exectly
the same integrated as JavaScript, Java is going to be interpreted
in the same way as well, method inlining across language
boundaries, Truffle is the intepreter API and comes with
language-independent tooling, GraalVM is able to output bitcode
instead of native code with LLVM, native image was used to compile
the Graal compiler itself, the native image contains garbage
collector, native image is considered "early adopters" technology,
HotSpot mode is still 20% to 50% faster, G1 is going to be
available on the native image as well, in future the performance of
the AOT could vary +/-10% compared to JIT, polymorphic invocations
could become faster on the native image / AOT, profile guided
optimizations can be performed also ahead of time, new native
images could learn from the past, the stability of AOT and JIT are
similar, twitter already uses AOT for years, with Java you have the
choice between AOT and JIT, unikernels could be supported by
GraalVM in future, the GraalVM is hiring,

Thomas Wuerthinger on twitter: @thomaswue