The Fast VM for Alpha [5] is a fast, full-featured virtual machine for Alpha and Tru64 Unix. For the purposes of this paper, we will concentrate on the JIT inside this JVM, as the majority of modifications required to port to x86/Linux occur inside the JIT. In this section, we describe three JIT optimizations that are crucial for efficient performance on x86 and which, for various reasons, required some redesign for the x86 port.
We describe the optimizations here - we postpone our experimental analysis of these optimizations to the performance section (Section 4).