Abstract

The Java language provides a promising solution to the design of safe programs, with an application spectrum ranging from Web services to operating system components. The well-known tradeoff of Java's portability is the inefficiency of its basic execution model, which relies on the interpretation of an object-based virtual machine. Many solutions have been proposed to overcome this problem, such as just-in-time (JIT) and offline bytecode compilers. However, most compilers trade efficiency for either portability or the ability to dynamically load bytecode. In this paper, we present an approach which reconciles portability and efficiency, and preserves the ability to dynamically load bytecode. We have designed and implemented an efficient environment for the execution of Java programs, named Harissa. Harissa permits the mixing of compiled and interpreted methods. Harissa's compiler translates Java bytecode to C, incorporating aggressive optimizations such as virtualmethod call optimizati...

Citations