The Maxine Virtual Machine
By Doug Simon and Ben L. Titzer

Abstract: The Maxine Virtual Machine
(http://research.sun.com/projects/maxine/) aims to support VM research and
enable fast prototyping of language features and implementation techniques. A
meta-circular design implemented in the Java(TM) programming language blurs
the distinction between VM and application and greatly simplifies important VM
components. This talk will present details of the VM that make it attractive
as a high performance but malleable platform for VM research. We will discuss
two of the three compilers in Maxine: C1X , a port of the HotSpot client
compiler, and the bootstrap compiler, which is based on continuation passing
style. In addition, we will present the Maxine Inspector, a combined object
browser and debugger that extensively leverages the meta-circularity of the VM
to present a high-fidelity and robust debugging and inspection tool for
Maxine.

Doug's Bio: Doug Simon is a Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories
and is currently leading the Maxine project, an open source Virtual Machine
for the JavaTM platform written (mostly) in Java. Prior to Maxine, Doug was
one half of the team that developed Squawk, a CLDC compliant JVM implemented
also (mostly) in Java. Squawk is the underlying JVM for the Sun SPOTs, a
wireless sensor device developed at Sun Labs. Another earlier project was to
investigate secure, fine-grained dynamic provisioning of applications on small
devices. The artifact from this project was the SKVM, a modified version of
the KVM (the reference CLDC JVM). Yes, Doug likes working on virtual machines.
Doug obtained a Bachelors in Information Technology from the University of
Queensland in 1997, graduating with first class honors.

Ben's Bio: Ben L. Titzer is a Member of Technical staff at Sun Microsystems
Laboratories. Since October 2007, he has been working on the Maxine VM, a
meta-circular virtual machine for Java written in Java. Ben earned his PhD in
Computer Science from UCLA in 2007 under the supervision of Professor Jens
Palsberg. Programming languages and their implementations have always been at
the forefront of his research interest; his doctoral work focused on Virgil, a
lightweight object-oriented language for microcontrollers that employed
several novel compiler techniques for space optimization enabled by Virgil's
object model. In 2006 he interned with David Bacon at IBM Research and
developed the ExoVM, an application-specific persistence technique applied to
an embedded version of the J9 virtual machine. In 2002 and 2003, he interned
at Sun Labs with Grzegorz Czajkowski and Laurent Daynes, using native code
isolation techniques to prevent privilege escalation for multiple users in the
multi-tasking virtual machine (MVM), which was based on HotSpot. In 2001 and
2002, he worked under Professor Jan Vitek at Purdue on the OVM and some of its
support tools.