Archive for May 28th, 2008

JamVM is a new Java Virtual Machine which conforms to the JVM specification version 2 (blue book). In comparison to most other VM's (free and commercial) it is extremely small, with a stripped executable on PowerPC of only ~200K, and Intel 180K. However, unlike other small VMs (e.g. KVM) it is designed to support the full specification, and includes support for object finalisation, Soft/Weak/Phantom References, class-unloading, the Java Native Interface (JNI) and the Reflection API.JamVM currently only includes an interpreter (keeps it small). However, the interpreter is highly optimised, and performance is on par with a simple JIT. As most of the code is written in C it is easy to port to new architectures.

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