Towards a Universal VM

The success of the Java platform is powered by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which many people assume is tied to the Java programming language. In fact, 100+ programming languages are hosted on the JVM, including JavaFX, JRuby, Jython, Groovy, Clojure, and Scala. A key implementation challenge is to make code written in non-Java languages run as fast as code written in the Java language.

This talk looks at how the design of the JVM is evolving to improve performance of all languages. It explains new features like the invokedynamic bytecode - intended for the next release of the Java SE platform - that let language implementers fully realize the power of the JVM.

About Brian Goetz

Brian Goetz has been a professional software developer for 20 years. He is the author of over 75 articles on software development, and his book, Java Concurrency In Practice, was published in May 2006 by Addison-Wesley. He serves on the JCP Expert Groups for JSRs 166 (concurrency utilities), 107 (caching), and 305 (annotations for safety analysis). He is a frequent presenter at JavaOne, OOPSLA, JavaPolis, SDWest, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Tour. Brian is a Sr. Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

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