I’ve just come back from three days in Santa Clara, spending time with some of the brightest people in the Java world – the JVM language summit is truly a fantastic collection of great people. And I was there too…

THe goal of the JVM language summit is to collect the people who work with languages on the JVM and have them share their projects, their experiences and their networks – and let them network with the people in charge of implementing the JVM’s for different companies. This year, a lot of discussion about JSR 292 and project lambda was on the plate. The presence of hardware and VM people was also more pronounced. I counted principals for at least six different virtual machines in the audience or presenting (Hotspot, JRockit, J9, Azul, Maxine, and Monty).

Among the experienced platform and language people there, some of the notables included Kresten Krab Thorup, Joshua Bloch, Bob Lee, Neal Gafter, John Rose, Brian Goetz, Alex Buckley, Rich Hickey, Charles Nutter, Cliff Click, Doug Lea, Per Bothner and many more. A great collection of people.

As an example of the funny happenstance that can happen in this collection of people, I was sitting rebinding my Java implementations for Mac OS X – and I had remove lots of links in /usr/bin. A few minutes later the person next to me started asking some questions about my experience with Java on the Mac – and it turns out he’s the manager for the Apple JVM team. Or at one point Rich Hickey reported on a quite puzzling problem that causes bad semantics when iterating over data that doesn’t fit in memory – and Cliff Click immediately opens up his laptop, says “give me an half hour and I’ll see what I can do”.

Another funny anecdote was when Doug Lea pointed out that if you use fibonacci to test performance against yourself or others, it’s important that the implementations actually agrees about the first values of fib. Funnily enough, I saw three different implementations of the ground rule in fib during the summit – all of them different. (if n < 2 return 1, if n<=2 return n, if n < 2 return n).

There were way too many interesting presentations and discussions for me to be able to talk about all of them – instead I just wanted to give some highlights.

Charles Nutter

Charles gave a quick introduction to JRuby and Mirah, and what kind of optimizations JRuby is currently doing. He also talked about how far he’s gotten in inlining invoke dynamic calls inside of JRuby (and he’s gotten very far – it’s really cool).

Fredrik Öhrström

Fredrik is the JRockit representative on JSR 292, and way too smart. He presented a solution to how you can use method handles integrated with function types to solve many of the current problems in project lambda. A very powerful and interesting presentation.

Doug Lea

Doug spent his keynote trying (quite successfully) to concinve the room of the hegemony of fork-join as a good solution to concurrency problems. A very good and thought provoking keynote.

Josh Bloch

Last year at the JVM language summit, Josh talked about what he called “the Semantic Gap”. This year, after being beat up by some linguists, he changed the name of this concept to “Performance Anxiety”. The basic idea is that in our current infrastructure we have traded performance for predictability. Two examples from his talk about when this happens in Java was pretty interesting. He had one benchmark that consistently showed about the same numbers for the same JVM run, but differed between JVM runs. There was no undeterminism in the benchmark itself, but they benchmark times continued to oscillate between 0.7 and 0.85 depending on JVM run. Cliff Clicks explanation for this is that it is probably the compilation planner, which is a separate thread. Depending on when that thread runs the compilation strategy will be different, and makes a difference in times. And it’s really hard for the programmer to take this difference into account.

The other example is simpler (and don’y change your code because of this). In some circumstances it turns out that & is faster than && in Java, because a && will short curcuit, which means it will branch. The single ampersand will always execute both sides, which means the CPU can pipeline both of them to execute at the same time.

All the examples he shown comes down to the same thing – we can’t really reason intuitively about the performance of our language constructs anymore. Our systems have become to complex in order to support better performance, and we give up predictability to get that performance. And at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter if you go down to C or assembler – you still cannot control exactly what the CPU is doing anymore.

Kresten Krab Thorup

Kresten is the CTO of Trifork, and one of the main organizers of many of my favorite conferences (like JAOO and QCon). The last nine months he has worked on an Erlang implementation for Java, which he talked about. It seems to be a very good implementation, and he’s getting surprisingly good performance and context switching numbers. In fact, several of the ideas in Seph will be stolen from Erjang.

Rémi Forax

Rémi showed off his PHP.reboot project, implemented using JSR 292 and getting quite good performance. His JSR 292 backport seems to be really useful and I think I’ll use that to make sure Seph can run on pre Java 7 machines. Good stuff.

Rich Hickey

Rich spent some time collecting comments from people in the room of what was problematic with the JVM in its current incarnation. To start us off, he showed one piece of hilarious/horrible Clojure code. Any one wants to guess what it does?

static public Object ret1(Object ret, Object nil) {
    return ret;
}

public static int count(Object o){
    if(o instanceof Counted)
        return ((Counted) o).count();
    return countFrom(Util.ret1(o, o = null));
}

We then went on to a few other things (which you can find on the JVM Language Summit wiki). The consensus seemed to be that tail calls is really very important. Last year, it wasn’t as crucial but now that we see how powerful method handles and lambda will be, tail calls turn out to be very nice to have. Hopefully we can make that happen.

JSR 292

The JSR 292 expert group got lots of chances to work on ideas and designs for the future. Lots of interesting results came out of these discussions. Some of the more notable ones are skisses on how method handles and function types can work together, how invoke dynamic and bootstrap method can be used to implement defender methods and several other interesting ideas.

All in all it has been a fun few days, going far out in language and implementation geekiness. I hope to come back to this next year.

By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: invoke dynamic, java, java 7, jsr292, jvm, jvm language summit, method handles, programming language design, programming languages. | #