CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/ch1 1w03 ss

Background

Over the last 10-15 years , the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has been a popular platform to host languages other than Java. This can be attributed to the performance and “write-once-run-anywhere” portability of the JVM , as well as the other advanced features, providing runtime environments to the other languages.

Why have so many languages , including Ruby, Groovy,and Python, been ported to Java ? The main reason is because its easier to target one platform and rely on the multi platform JVM to host it than it is to write interpreters for each of the operating system. Additionally , with the JVM’s advanced Just-in-time (JIT) compilation ,the resulting compiled and optimized Java bytecode will typically run with equal or better performance than naive interpreters. Further , the Java JIT compiler continues to optimize code well after it’s first complied ,depending upon changes in code execution and branching. The cost and effort associated with building this into each independent interpreter makes this kind of performance prohibitive; so , it makes sense to leverage the JVM’s existing multi platform implementation of this performance optimization feature . A list of other features that JVM brings along are a huge set of well tested libraries , garbage collection , excellent built-in tools and debugging interfaces that a language developer can easily plug into.