VIRTUAL MACHINE ENVIRONMENT AND FRAMEWORK PERFORMANCE

Abstract

The Virtual machines are an important component of modern portable environments. Their performance is critical to the success of such environments, but they are difficult to design well because they are subject to conflicting goals. On the one hand, they offer a way to hide the differences between instruction architectures; on the other, they must be implemented efficiently on a variety of underlying machines. A comparison of the engineering and evolution of the Inferno and Java virtual machines provides insight into the tradeoffs in their design and implementation. We argue that the design of virtual machines should be rooted in the nature of modern processors, not language interpreters, with an eye towards on-the-fly compilation rather than interpretation or special-purpose silicon.