Oracle have published slides and videos of the 2013 JVM Language Summit, held in July this year. The JVM Language Summit is an opportunity for researchers and language designers who use the JVM to develop alternative languages or reports from JVM designers as to how to take advantage of the platform.
Since its first release, the Java platform has benefited massively from a standard JVM specification, which introduced bytecode and a compatibility layer that allowed programs to run whatever the architecture. Although initially interpreted, since the very early days the JVM has had a JIT optimiser to improve the speed of execution and increase the performance of the overall platform. These days the JVM is the power workhorse that allows Java applications to run at near C speeds.
The bytecode was always intended to be specified independently from Java, to allow the future co-existence of other languages (and to make the Java compiler's job easier; by moving the optimisations down into the runtime instead of the compiler, newer releases of the JVM have increased the speed of existing Java code, without recompilation). Since 2008, the JVM Summit has brought together those who develop the JVM with those who develop on it.
This year's summit saw non-Java languages such as Scala war stories (video), R in Java (video) and Kotlin Reflection (video). Also present was JRuby's Charles Nutter on the Java Native Runtime (video, github project, maven central assets) that aims to provide a real POSIX layer for Java, using a more optimised version of native code conventions than the JNI currently allows.
Work on the JVM was also covered; fitting Nashorn on the JVM (video) as well as Nashorn war stories (video) were covered, and performance was also addressed with lambda performance (video), JVM benchmarking (video), packed objects in Java (video), hybrid partial evaluation (video) project sumatra (video), and GPU offloading (video). Other low-level components such as Java 8 for compiler writers (video) and JVM bridge methods (video) were also presented.
Big companies and big data were represented with OpenJDK at Google (video), Big Data (video) and data parallel programming (video). In fact, everything from big data to mobile devices were covered, as the summit also included JSR 292 on Android (video).
The JVM language summit brings together all manner of commercial organisations, researches and language developers, and the result of these is a two-way channel between those invested in the platform and those investing in the platform. If you want to get a sneak peek of where the future of the JVM might lie, these videos might offer a glimpse.
