Titre : VMKit: a Substrate for Managed Runtime Environments

Auteur : Gael Thomas (REGAL - LIP6 - UPMC)

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 talk will describe 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. An extensive
study of this infrastructure assesses the ease of implementing new MREs
or MRE extensions and evaluates the resulting performance. In particular,
it took one person only one month to develop a Common
Language Runtime using VMKit. VMKit furthermore has performance 
comparable to 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.