Pointers for Research on Java Implementation

This page lists interesting papers related to Java and JVM. It is directly adapted from Bill Pugh's Java resources page.

• Interpreters and Stack machines
• Java Virtual Machine
• Analysis and Optimization
• Optimizing Java
• Optimizing Object Oriented languages
• Run-time code generation
• Garbage Collection
• Security
• Formal models and type theory
• Code compression
• Concurrency and synchronization
• Distributed computing
• Conferences

Interpreters and Stack machines

• Performance Measurement of Interpreted Programs, Tia Newhall and Barton Miller, University of Wisconsin, EuroPar'98.
• The Structure and Performance of Interpreters, T. H. Romer, D. Lee, G. M. Voelker, A. Wolman, W. A. Wong, J.-L. Baer, B. N. Bershad, and H. M. Levy, Proc. ASPLOS VII, pages 150-159.
• "Two-Level Hybrid Interpreter/Native Code Execution for Combined Space-Time Program Efficiency", T. Pitman, Proc. SIGPLAN'87 Symposium on Interpreters and Interpretive Techniques, pages 150-152.
• Optimizing an ANSI C Interpreter with Superoperators, T. A. Proebsting, Proc. POPL'95, pages 322-332.
• Stack computers: the new wave, Philip Koopman
• A preliminary Exploration of Optimized Stack Code Generation, Philip Koopman
• Optimizing direct threaded code by selective inlining, Ian Piumarta and Fabio Riccardi. In PLDI'98.
• The design of the Inferno virtual machine, Phil Winterbottom and Rob Pike.
• The Structure and Performance of Interpreters, Theodore H. Romer, Dennis Lee, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Alec Wolman, Wayne A. Wong, Jean-Loup Baer, Brian N. Bershad, and Henry M. Levy.

Java Virtual Machine

• Oak Intermediate Bytecodes, J. Gosling, Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Intermediate Representations (IR '95), pages 111-118.
• The Java Virtual Machine Specification. T. Lindholm and F. Yellin, Addison-Wesley, 1997.
• Java Virtual Machine. J. Meyer and T. Downing, O'Reilly, 1997.
• The Evolution of Numerical Computing in Java, James Gosling
• A Personal Commentary on the Java Virtual Machine Specification by Philip W. L. Fong
• Binary Component Adaptation

Analysis and Optimization

• Complete Removal of Redundant Expressions, R. Bodik, R. Gupta and M.L. Soffa, ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, Montreal, Canada, June 1998.

Optimizing Java

• Hotspot Whitepaper
• Optimizing Java bytecodes, M. Cierniak and W. Li, Concurrency: Practice and Experience 9(6), June 1997, 427-444. (slides)
• A Java Bytecode Optimizer Using Side-effect Analysis, Lars Raeder Clausen, Aarhus University, Denmark
• Java on Steroids: Sun's High-Performance Java Implementation, U. Hölzle (slides from HotChips IX, August 1997)
• Optimizing Java: theory and practice, Z. Budimlic and K. Kennedy, Concurrency: Practice and Experience 9(6), June 1997, pages 445-463. (slides)
• CACAO - A 64 bit JavaVM Just-in-Time Compiler, A. Krall and R. Grafl, Concurrency: Practice and Experience 9(11), November 1997, pages 1017-1030.
• Efficient JavaVM Just-in-Time Compilation, Andreas Krall, Pact 98.
• "Optimizing NET Compilers for Improved Java Performance", C.-H. A. Hseih, M. T. Conte, T. L. Johnson, J. C. Gyllenhaal, and W.-M. W. Hwu, Computer 30(6), June 1997, pages 67-75.
• Optimizing Java, Zoran Budimlic
• Toba: Java For Applications, A Way Ahead of Time (WAT) Compiler, Todd A. Proebsting, Gregg Townsend, Patrick Bridges, John H. Hartman, Tim Newsham and Scott A. Watterson COOTS'97 June 1997.
• Marmot: an Optimizing Compiler for Java, Robert Fitzgerald, Todd B. Knoblock, Erik Ruf, Bjarne Steensgaard, and David Tarditi
• Stack Allocating Objects in Java, David Gay and Bjarne Steensgaard

Optimizing Object Oriented languages

• Adaptive Optimization for Self: Reconciling High Performance with Exploratory Programming, Urs Hölzle, Ph.D Thesis (Urs Hölzle)
• "A Third-Generation Self Implementation", Urs Hölzl and David Ungar, OOPSLA '94
• "Object, Message, and Performance: How They Coexist in Self", D. Ungar, R. B. Smith, C. Chambers, and U. Hölzle, Computer 25(10), October 1992, pages 53-64.
• "Iterative Type Analysis and Extended Message Splitting: Optimizing Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Programs", C. Chambers and D. Ungar, Proc. PLDI'90, pages 150-164.
• Vortex: An Optimizing Compiler for Object-Oriented Languages Jeffrey Dean, Greg DeFouw, David Grove, Vassily Litvinov, and Craig Chambers (OOPSLA'96)
• Whole-Program Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages Craig Chambers, Jeffrey Dean, and David Grove (Technical report, 1996)
• Profile-Guided Receiver Class Prediction David Grove, Jeffrey Dean, Charles Garrett, and Craig Chambers (OOPSLA'95)
• Methods For Enhancing the Performance of Object-Oriented Languages, Glenn Weinstein
• Automatic Inline Allocation of Objects, Julian Dolby, PLDI 1997
• An Evaluation of Object Inline Allocation Techniques, Dolby & Chien, OOPSLA 1998.
• The Self Project

Run-time code generation

• Evaluating Runtime-Compiled Value-Specific Optimizations, D. Keppel, S. J. Eggers, and R. R. Henry, Technical Report 93-11-02, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington.
• DCG: An Efficient, Retargetable Dynamic Code Generation System, D. R. Engler and T. A. Proebsting, Proc. ASPLOS-VI, 1994, pages 263-271. (slides)
• Fast, Effective Dynamic Compilation, J. Auslander, M. Philipose, C. Chambers, S. J. Eggers, and B. N. Bershad, Proc. PLDI'96, pages 149-158.
• VCODE: A Retargetable, Extensible, Very Fast Dynamic Code Generation System, D. R. Engler, Proc. PLDI'96, pages 160-170.
• Dynamic Compilation Bibliography
• Fast, effective code generation in a just-in-time Java compiler Adl-Tabatabai et al, PLDI 1998.
• Efficient JavaVM Just-in-Time Compilation, Krall, PACT 98
• Fast, Effective Dynamic Compilation, Joel Auslander, Matthai Philipose, Craig Chambers, Susan Eggers, and Brian Bershad. In PLDI'96.
• tcc: A System for Fast, Flexible, and High-Level Dynamic Code Generation, Massimiliano Poletto, Dawson R. Engler, and M. Frans Kaashoek.

Garbage Collection

• Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic memory Management, R. Jones and R. Lins, John Wiley & Sons, 1996.
• The Garbage Collection Page, Richard Jones
• Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques, Paul R. Wilson, ACM Computing Surveys
• Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review, Paul R. Wilson, Mark S. Johnstone, Michael Neely, and David Boles. In International Workshop on Memory Management, Kinross, Scotland, UK, September 1995.
• Incremental Collection of Mature Objects, Richard Hudson and Eliot Moss. International Workshop on Memory Management, St. Malo, France, Sept. 1992, pp. 388-403, available from Springer-Verlag.
• Incremental Mature Garbage Collection Using the Train Algorithm, by Jacob Seligmann and Steffen Grarup (slides)

Security

• Java is not type-safe, Vijay Saraswat
• Dynamic Class Loading in the Java Virtual Machine, Sheng Liang and Gilad Bracha OOPSLA 1998.
• Understanding Java Stack Inspection, Dan Wallach and Edward Felten
• George Neccula's papers
  • Proof-Carrying Code, G. C. Necula, Proc. POPL'97.
  • The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler, George C. Necula, Peter Lee. In PLDI'98.
• Java Security, Scott Oaks, O'Reilly
• Links on Mobile code and security, Arnaud Sahuguet.
• Extensible Security Architectures for Java, Dan Wallach, Dirk Balfanz, Drew Dean, Edward Felten. In SoSP'97.

Formal models and type theory

• Is the Java Type System Sound?. Sophia Drossopoulou, Susan Eisenbach and Sarfraz Khurshid. TAPOS 5(1), 1999.
• Java is Type Safe -- Probably. Sophia Drossopoulou and Susan Eisenbach. ECOOP'97.
• Java light is Type-Safe -- Definitely. Tobias Nipkow and David von Oheimb. PoPL'98.
• Towards an Operational Semantics and Proof of Type Soundness for Java. Sophia Drossopoulou and Susan Eisenbach. March 1998.
• Reasoning about Java Classes (Preliminary report). B. Jacobs, M. Huisman, M. van Berkum, U. Hensel, H. Tews. OOPSLA'98.
• A Type System for Object Initialization in the Java Bytecode Language. Stephen N. Freund and John C. Mitchell. OOPSLA'98.
• A Type System for Java Bytecode Subroutines. Raymie Stata and Martín Abadi. PoPL'98.
• A Fragment Calculus -- towards a model of Separate Compilation, Linking and Binary Compatibility. Sophia Drossopoulou, Susan Eisenbach, David Wragg. LICS'99.
• What is Java Binary Compatibility?. Sophia Drossopoulou, David Wragg, Susan Eisenbach. OOPSLA'98.
• What can Java Binary Compatibility mean?. Sophia Drossopoulou, Susan Eisenbach, David Wragg. January 1999.

Code compression

• Code compression, Jens Ernst, Christopher W. Fraser, William Evans, Steven Lucco, and Todd A. Proebsting, PLDI'97: 358-365, 6/97. (NOTE: This paper breaks ghostview, but should print OK.)
• Customs Instruction Sets for Code Compression, Chris Frases and Todd Proebsting.
• Compressing Java Class Files, William Pugh. In PLDI'99.

Concurrency and synchronization

• Monitors and Exceptions: How to implement Java efficiently, Andreas Krall and Mark Probst, Technical University, Vienna, Austria
• Thin locks: featherweight synchronization for Java, David F. Bacon, Ravi Konuru, Chet Murthy, and Mauricio Serrano, PLDI 1998.
• Fixing the Java Memory Model, William Pugh, In Java Grande 99.

Distributed computing

• Efficient Implementations of Java RMI, V. Krishnaswamy, D. Walther, S. Bhola, E. Bommaiah, G. Riley, B. Topol and M. Ahamad. In Proc. of Usenix Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS), April 1998.
• An Efficient Implementation of Java's Remote Method Invocation, Jason Maassen, Rob van Nieuwpoort, Ronald Veldema, Henri E. Bal, and Aske Plaat. In PPoPP'99.

Conferences

• ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for High-Performance Network Computing
• ACM 1999 Java Grande Conference