[LLVMdev] Introducing myself, and Java project.

[Tanya Lattner]

Have you looked at the this?
http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project/java/trunk/

Someone started a Java frontend. Perhaps you could finish it?

-Tanya

On Feb 2, 2008, at 5:48 PM, Ramón García wrote:

> Hello, I am Ramon Garcia Fernandez. My interest in LLVM is to develop
> an interface for Java virtual machine bytecodes, so that Java programs
> can be run under LLVM.
>
> You may ask why not using the Java virtual machine. Although it may be
> improved, there are some misfeatures in it. This is what I have
> learned. It makes the communication with native code too expensive.
> Passing an array from native to the virtual machine or vice versa
> requires a copy of the data. Why? you may ask. Because Java uses
> garbage collectors based on copying. Thus the position of an object
> may be moved by the virtual machine. The implementation of
> generational garbage collection in Java uses areas of memory for each
> generation, so that when an object changes from the young generation
> to the old its storage must be moved. This may give some performance
> advantage, by making young objects close in memory, but with the cost
> of making exchange of data with native code expensive. In particular,
> data copying is required for reading and writing files, sending or
> receiving data from the network, or drawing. Since Java is not often
> used for numerical analysis or tasks that require little data exchange
> with the outside world, I disagree that the implementation with a
> copying collector is good for most applications.
>
> A more obvious problem is, of course, that it is not possible to
> compile Java code statically and save the result in the disk.
>
> So I am starting to write a compiler of Java bytecode to LLVM
> bytecode. For now I am designing, dealing with things such as how to
> assign stack positions to the operands of each instruction.
>
> My target is to deliver something simple. Operations such as
> classloader creation and dynamic class loading will not be supported.
>
> Hoping that this is the start of a long term cooperation,
>
>     Ramon
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