Tuesday 18 May 2010

JamVM and OpenJDK - Progess Update

Porting JamVM to use the OpenJDK/IcedTea class-library has been on my TODO list for quite a while. It appears on my FOSDEM slides for 2008 and again in 2009. It doesn't this year, as I didn't do a talk. Maybe that's why I've finally got round to doing it. I told Twisti I'd get "Hello World" running in 3 months. I've missed by just over a week, mainly because I only started 2 months ago.
root@traken:/usr/local/jamvm/bin# java -Xbootclasspath:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/rt.jar -Dsun.boot.library.path=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64 -showversion hello
java version "1.6.0_0"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.6.1) (6b16-1.6.1-3ubuntu1)
JamVM (build 1.5.5-openjdk, inline-threaded interpreter)

Hello World!
root@traken:/usr/local/jamvm/bin#

There's still quite a lot to do, including finishing off support for reflection and sun.misc.Unsafe but threading, exception handling, library handling, class-loading and the VM bootstrap sequence should be done.