Episode 144: The Maxine Research Virtual Machine with Doug Simon

In this episode we talk with Doug Simon from Sun Microsystems
Laboratories about the Maxine Research VM, a so-called
meta-circular virtual machine. Maxine is a JVM that is written
itself in Java, but aims at taking JVM development to the next
level while using highly integrated Java IDEs as development
environments and running and debugging the VM itself directly from
the Inspector, an IDE-like tool specialized for the Maxine VM.
During the episode we talk about the basic ideas behind Maxine,
what exactly "meta-circular" means and what makes it interesting
and promising to build a Java VM in Java. We talk about the
relationship to Sun's current production JVM (HotSpot) and about
ideas and directions for the future of Maxine.