One VM to Rule Them All [pdf]

http://lafo.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/papers/2013_JVMLanguageSummit_OneVMToRuleThemAll.pdf

by charlestuy • 13 years ago

161 88 13 years ago

lafo.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at

terhechte• 13 years ago

I couldn't gather much additional information from the slides, but do I understand this correctly that this substrate vm is an alternative jvm implementation that is faster and requires less memory? Would it be possible to port the usual jvm projects like Clojure or Scala to this in order to claim the same speed/memory gains as the described ruby implementation?

hrjet• 13 years ago

The speed / memory gains seem to be because of optimising away the dynamic type overhead.

So Clojure yes but Scala, no.

th0br0• 13 years ago

Now if the SVM is to have a very fast FFI I think it would have the potential to be awesome. Especially as the SVM seems to be easily embeddable...

phwamgflw3• 13 years ago

Some seriously impressive numbers. Hope they take this further :)

VeejayRampay• 13 years ago

I hope this is not yet another project that holds a ton of promises and never end up delivering cause it looks absolutely awesome on paper.

bryanlarsen• 13 years ago

Definitely an interesting project.

It would be interesting to compare this to parrot[1], which had similar goals.

Javascript and the JVM are currently occupying this niche to a certain degree, although neither were originally designed for this niche.

1: http://www.parrot.org/

raphinou• 13 years ago

Anyone having an idea why parrot is not more popular?

iso-8859-1• 13 years ago

Because it's associated with Perl 6 which is commenly believed to be vaporware (yes, even if there have been releases). And because they want to make it so perfect that people can't remember why they used to be excited about it.

perlgeek2• 13 years ago

Because it's not really a good VM.

It's full of good ideas, but also full of cruft and years of technical debt. It doesn't have a JIT compiler, (nearly) no async IO, threading support is pretty new and not battle-tested nor documented very well.

chromatic3• 13 years ago

Because supporting the Rakudo attempt to implement Perl 6 turned out to be an unpleasant slog through an unnavigable field of abuse and nonsense:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2013/02/goodnight-parrot.h...

tluyben24• 13 years ago

This looks interesting, but I am generally worried about something being owned by Oracle. Simple example; I own an Openpandora. I wrote a live coding environment in Java with a very basic, lispy language at it's core. Using any free Java implementation it either; did not start (core dump; suspect; not enough memory to get even the VM up) or ran very (unusable) slow. With the Java 7 closed source ARM version from Oracle; runs fast (just as smooth as on my Macbook) and uses very little memory.

I have the same experience on x86, but because of the abundance of resources it's less noticable.

I don't insist on everything being open source (completely), but base languages/VMs should be. Unless something about this changes, I'm not using anything owned by Oracle again.

lispm• 13 years ago

probably oracle has now patents on ecery tiny detail...

dubbledidu4• 13 years ago

Yes. The first slide basically guaranteed that I will never look into this project.

The risk of touching anything Oracle-related is not worth the potential benefit.

phwamgflw3• 13 years ago

How very open-minded of you. At least consider the project on it's metrics, not on your distaste for a particular corporation.

e12e• 13 years ago

After hearing how Solaris support when down the drain with Oracle stewardship, I'd say staying away from anything Oracle sounds reasonable. At least if it isn't under something like GPL with a patent grant.

(Yes, the fact that they screwed minor Solaris customers does not translate to them suing over IP -- but then again, they already did the last part to).

Oracle is probably a great company to invest in; they make a lot of money -- but that alone doesn't make them a good stakeholder in your core business. I wouldn't want to partner with McDonalds either.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

This is actually cool, but I'll wait for an open-source, patent-troll-protected, implementation. Oracle can even try the Microsoft solution of promising never to sue you for reimplementing their stuff, but, if I don't trust Microsoft to keep their promises, why would I trust Oracle?

BTW, Am I the only one who noticed the Lord of the Rings theme?

thomaswue• 13 years ago

The Graal OpenJDK project is available open source with a GPL license (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/graal/). The Truffle API includes a Classpath exception allowing language implementors free choice of license (http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/graal-dev/2013-August...). We welcome anybody who wants to work with us on moving language implementations co-existing on a single platform forward.

dubbledidu4• 13 years ago

The problem is that nobody trusts Oracle. Have a look at what happened to Google. Their code didn't even originate from Oracle and they still got sued for made-up, bullshit reasons.

It of course sucks for those who invested their time in hacking the Oracle stack, but I think many people these days outside the Oracle bubble see Oracle as a dead-end.

Most people don't have a war chest full of money to hire the best lawyers like Google to protect them against baseless lawsuits.

Anyway, even from a technical point of view, things like Graal and Truffle are terrible workarounds and I prefer just fixing the things which are broken in the first place. Seeing that this will never happen at Oracle, I'll just work on code were the maintainer/owners are not so openly hostile.

pron9• 13 years ago

There's a lot that can be said about Oracle's stewardship of Java, what it's like and how it should improve; it's a very important conversation. But the tone of your comment (and some of its child comments) seem to take the discussion in a misinformed direction. I don't know how much of the world's important server-side software is written in Java (or runs on the JVM), but I wouldn't be surprised if it's around 80%. The fact of the matter is that aside from small-to-medium startups' servers, the world's server-side software is mostly Java. Almost all non-embedded, large defense software is Java; almost all banking software is Java; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google are mostly Java/JVM shops (when it comes to their infrastructure software).

Saying "I'm not using anything owned by Oracle" is something most serious server-side developers just can't say, because, frankly, there's little choice. If you require high-performance, multi-million-LOC software developed by a large team, you would be quite foolish to choose anything but the JVM. So we should certainly discuss Oracle's behavior, but pretending that we can avoid Oracle software like it was a specific linux distribution is a misrepresentation of reality.

integricho2• 13 years ago

Meaning the world is in corporate hands,sad enough.

ghostdiver• 13 years ago

Oracles flagship product can be replaced by Postgres? No?

ps. Why compare with top 3 american internet giants, what's the point?

Gonzih• 13 years ago

OpenJDK?

jandrewrogers2• 13 years ago

You are correct that the JVM is ubiquitous in server software but not nearly as much as you assume and there has been a shift away from it in recent years for reasons having nothing to do with Oracle etc. I've been designing high-performance server engines since the 1990s and have watched the architectures and tool chains evolve.

Five years ago most new server engine development was done on the JVM. Since then there has been a shift toward new development being done in C++ such that the vast majority of new server engines I know about are being developed in C++ (mostly C++11) across a diverse range of companies. The reasons are practical and reflect the evolution of hardware.

The short version is that on current hardware C++ is much more efficient, both in terms of throughput per core and can achieve integer factor improvements in absolute performance relative to the JVM. Most of the differences are boil down to two things. First, server performance tends to be bound by memory performance and the JVM is quite a bit worse than what is easily achievable in C++. Second, an optimal high-performance server engine design in C++ is difficult to express within the JVM so basic design of the engine kernel tends to be less efficient as well.

In large-scale systems, that starts to add up in terms of power and hardware consumption and companies are more sensitive to this than they used to be. C++ currently offers significantly better characteristics and using less hardware to do it.

tluyben24• 13 years ago

I agree with you, but as I can choose the software I create and with what I'm not very interested in working with Oracle stuff.

I worked with Java since 0.1 in the enterprise world for over 10 years and with Clojure & Scala I would continue with it, but I don't trust Oracle to do the right thing in releasing source at the same pace or at all for some critical perf/scaling features and I tend to think thats wrong.

How does OpenJDK handle serverside compared to the Oracle binaries these days?

pekk• 13 years ago

you would be quite foolish to choose anything but the JVM.

Do you have technical reasons for saying that, or only political ones?

steeve• 13 years ago

This is amazing.

First because it means we can have _fast_ versions of existing languages.

Second because we can interact with the _huge_ amount of JVM libraries (this is a very big deal).

Third because SubstrateVM seem to be enabling the things I really like about Go: low memory footprint, fast startup time, and easy deployment (give me a binary that does everything I need).

They just need to make sure native interop is easy (both C and C++), and we have a winner!

ceautery• 13 years ago

Neat. However, I had a hard time quieting my Algebra teacher's memory from tut-tutting the example's lack of the other quadratic root.

rootbear• 13 years ago

And the formula given has at least two bugs, I think. They give it as

     -b + (Math.sqrt(b**2 - 4*a*c)) / 2*a

Shouldn't it be

    (-b + (Math.sqrt(b**2 - 4*a*c))) / (2*a)

(still ignoring the other root, of course).

acqq4• 13 years ago

Even wierder, the tree in their presentation seems to represent:

     -b + (Math.sqrt(b**2 - 4*a*c)) / (2*a)

Which is neither the formula we'd expect nor the formula they show.

acqq4• 13 years ago

One VM to Rule Them All [pdf]

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