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Extending Java

There is always a demand for new features in Java, but it is difficult to extend the environment while preserving Java's ``Write Once, Run Anywhere'' promise. New features for Java could be implemented at a number of different levels: the source language, the compiler, the JVM, or the JIT compiler. JOIE adds a new level where extensions to the environment can be prototyped easily and safely. Once the extensions prove useful, they may be implemented at other levels, or perhaps remain implemented as a JOIE transformer. More generally, transformers can be used to run non-conforming code on standard JVMs, or conforming code on non-standard JVMs.

For example, consider the demand for support for complex numbers as primitives. While a developer could add such a feature to a compiler and matching JVM, classfiles produced by the compiler would not run correctly on any standard JVM. Alternatively, one could use a Complex class, with appropriate methods for adding, multiplying, etc. This solution is portable but inefficient.

However, a transformer could recognize the instantiation of Complex, and replace each instance with a pair of floats, and similarly replace method invocations with inline floating point operations. The transformed code will incur lower overhead than the relatively expensive method invocation, while conforming to the JVM standard. More importantly, the classfile running in a system without JOIE will still run correctly, if more slowly. Adding such a feature to Java does not require the transformer author to rewrite or even look at JVM source code.

A different style of extension could add new bytecodes to the JVM implementation. For example, the performance of numerical analysis programs may be improved by augmenting the instruction set with vector bytecodes implementing matrix operations such as sum, dot product, min, max, etc. A compiler could easily generate code using the new bytecodes, but the code would not run on any JVM that does not implement them. Assuming that a transformer could recognize these constructs, it could replace the standard long version of the code with the new bytecodes (or vice versa).

Parametric types are another example. The Thor group proposes an implementation of parametric types for Java [MBL97] that requires a modified JVM and compiler. A load-time transformer could translate a less efficient but standard implementation to use special new instructions.

More ambitious language extensions could add pre- and postconditions to methods [Mey92], continuations, closures, or multimethods. An implementation of ``security-style passing'' at Princeton [WF98] uses JOIE to achieve a feature similar to continuations, making some subset of the state of the computation available at all times.


next up previous
Next: Integrating Classes with a Up: Example Applications Previous: Example Applications

Geoff Alex Cohen
Tue Apr 28 14:31:49 EDT 1998