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About the Project
Who:
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The No Name JVM is being developed by RIT student Paul Lorenz
as an Independent Study project.The Independent Study is being overseen by
Professor Hans-Peter Bischof.
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What:
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The No Name JVM is indended to be a very basic JVM. It is not at this point
planned to conform to the full JVM
specification. The JVM will do little to no error checking, specifically, no
bytecode verification will be done.
Also, it is likely that threading will not be supported. This project is focused
on JVM basics: class loading,
linking, bytecode execution and garbage collection.
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How:
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The JVM builds on work done for Applied Research Seminar: JVM for Small Devices,
in which Team foobar (of which
Paul was a member) built garbage collectors. Specifically copy-collect,
mark-compact and simple generational garbage
collectors were built, as well as a fairly comprehensive test suite. Atop this
foundation the plan is to build a
very simple JVM. The first phase will involve loading Java classes and
integrating them into the test suite so
that Java classes and objects will be randomly allocated, linked and collected
when they become garbage. After this,
the plan is to construct a bytecode interpreter and integrate it with the
classloader and garbage collector already
built.
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Why:
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Aside from the sheer geek-chic coolness factor of building a JVM, there
are several areas which this project should prove most educational, including
but not
limited to: automatic memory management (MM) as well as generic MM techniques,
hashing algorithms, string handling, exception handling, stack management, code
optimization and all kinds of C knowledge from pointer arithmetic to
preprocessor usage. In addition, building a JVM should impart a deep
understanding of the way Java works, giving insights which should be useful when
building Java programs.
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Thanks To:
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The GNU ClassPath
project without
which I would have had to write all my own Java libraries.
Team foobar: Joe Binder, Jeff Myers, Matt McEuen and Bob Miller for a fun
quarter
building garbage collectors.
Tod Burchell for being a sounding board for ideas (see docs for credits).
Prof. Bishof for doing the independent study.
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