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.

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

There hasn’t been much interesting happening this summer, but the fall is shaping up to be pretty busy. I will be talking at several different conferences, and thought I’d mention when and where I will be appearing.

First, this week I’m presenting at JavaZone in Oslo. I will present at 11:45 tomorrow, talking about Ioke.

Next week is the JVM Language Summit in Santa Clara. It is shaping up to be a great collection of people with many interesting discussions and talks. Take a look at the details for the talks. The people there are some of the most experienced language developers and implementors in the world. It should be a blast. I will do a talk about Ioke, and also a workshop about the challenges of improving Ioke’s performance.

After that I will attend RubyFoo in London, Oct 2-3, where I will talk about JRuby. RubyFoo will feature Matz, Sam Aaron, Aslak Hellesøy, Adam Wiggins and me. It should be great fun!

At JAOO this year (Oct 4-9 in Aarhus, Denmark) I will do a tutorial about testing Java code with JRuby. This conference also looks like it will be great. Many interesting talks and speakers. And of course, JAOO is generally the best conference I’ve ever been to.

At Øredev in Malmö, Sweden (Nov 2-6), I will be talking about Ioke.

And finally, at QCon SF in San Francisco (Nov 16-20) I will be hosting a track on emerging languages. After JAOO, QCon is my favorite conference, so I think it will be very nice too.

So, several interesting conferences coming up. Hope to see many of you there!

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conference, conferences, jaoo, javazone, jvm language summit, london, malmö, oredev, oslo, presentations, qcon, qcon san francisco, qconsf, rubyfoo, san francisco, santa clara. | #

The final day of the language summit sported loads of interesting presentations, just like the first two days. I can’t over stress how well prepared these three days have been – especially with regards to the schedule. A huge thanks to Brian Goetz, John Rose and Charles Nutter, for being the main instigators and coordinators of this effort. Very nice work indeed.

The third day also marked a departure from being mostly JVM centered. The first presentation was Mads Torgersen from Microsoft, talking about LINQ. I hadn’t actually realized what a thin layer over regular closure syntax the LINQ infrastructure was. Quite impressive, although it still feels like one of those ideas that really makes sense in some cases, but not at all as many as was originally envisioned.

Per Bothner described his Kawa toolkits. If you didn’t know, Kawa is one of the older alternative language implementations for the JVM – but it’s not only an implementation of the Scheme language. It also contains parts of an Emacs Lisp, XQuery and Common Lisp implementations. As it turns out, Kawa has ended up being more of a general toolkit for building dynamic languages on top of the JVM. Very nice, and I’m seriously considering stealing parts of it for a few of my language projects. It was also a quite astute presentation with no unnecessary frills. Per ended his presentation with some thoughts about language design – and why so many languages seem to be dynamic just for the sake of being dynamic. I totally agree with his sentiment, even though ioke will be about as dynamic a language I can imagine.

Erik Meijer talked about Fundamentalist Functional Programming. Erik is always a hilarious speaker, and even if you don’t agree with everything he says, it’s great entertainment and loads of great quotes and soundbites. Eriks main point of view is that what is currently called functional programming is really nothing of the sort. The only way you can be really pure in a functional programming language is by specifying which parts of the implementation that has any side effects. If these are specified the side effects can be isolated and thus you can keep the rest of your system free from the taint of side effects. He showed several compelling examples of how side effects totally mess up calculations that look like the should have been correct and functional in approach. One thing he said that I really liked was when he talked about “types that lie”, where you have situations in many common languages that have static types but the types doesn’t actually tell you the whole truth. In that case Erik feels it’s better to just be dynamic, since dynamic languages at least doesn’t have dishonest types. Of course, the thrust of the presentation was Haskell, and how Erik is trying to sneak the benefits of Haskell into Visual Basic. He’s got his own group for fooling around with things like this, and it does sound extremely interesting. Oh, and he’s looking for people for his team. In another life, if I’d been more convinced about static typing, I might have applied.

I ended up spending most of the lunch/open space time working on my Antlr-ELisp system. It’s actually coming along really great. Simple lexing works and I have most of the DFA handling implemented too. It ended up being a really fun project although lack of lexical closure bites me over and over again. I’m just too used to it from Scheme and Common Lisp, and not having it makes my brain hurt sometimes.

Part of the open space time was also devoted to a quick introduction by Cliff Click to his Azul systems. Every time I see the kind of analysis he can do with that VM I’m astonished. It’s just so cool stuff. Everyone should have an account there. Really.

After lunch, Rene Jansen from IBM talked about NetRexx – one of those JVM languages that aren’t as well known, but lives a really successful life inside of company boundaries. I really wonder have many of those languages there really are.

Paul Phillips gave a presentation about Scalify – one of those funny, half way crazy projects. It aims to translate Java code to Scala, to make adoption for Scala easier. At first glance this sounds quite easy, but there are several complications to the approach, and Paul introduced it all in a candid and interesting way.

After that it was Neal Gafter’s turn (who is nowadays at Microsoft. Will the world ever start making sense? =). From the title of the presentation I got the impression it would mostly be about closure proposals, but instead he talked a lot about the impedance mismatch between different languages on the JVM, how you can handle that and what needs to be done to the core language to make it possible to interoparete better between languages. Closures is one of the things that Java really doesn’t have, and it’s very obvious from the design of the standard libraries. Very good and thoughtful presentation.

Cliff Click did one of his typical romps about the JVM and how well some of the alternative language translate to bytecode. Extremely entertaining and full of small factoids about the JVM (like the usefulness/lack of usefulness of the Integer.valueOf cache in some cases).

After that, I did a short presentation about Jatha, and tried to mention some generalities about the languages that haven’t succeeded so far, and what kind of support they might want to have from the JVM in the future.

The last talk of the day was about the Parrot VM. In this case there were a bit too much introductory material about dynamic languages, and not enough meat about how the Parrot VM actually works. I would have loved to get much more deep content here than I actually did.

All in all the Friday was an extremely strong day with regards to presentations. Loads of technical content but also some more high level musings that contained real insight about the current state of programming language implementations. I’m very happy with the whole JVM language summit, and it seems like it will happen again next year. If you have any interest in this area I recommend that you set aside the time to go. It will be worth your while.

And now I’m off to JAOO, which also seems to have lots of delicious content for a language geek like myself. We do live in very interesting times.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: jvm language summit. | #

I’m sitting here during the third day of the JVM language summit, and thought I’d summarize the second day a bit. Hopefully I’ll soon be able to write about this day too as soon as it’s over.

The second day started out with Gosling talking about some of his history and how that influenced the design and implementation of Java. Not extremely interesting, but a few funny soundbites. Best was probably the quote from Guy Steele: “Lisp is like a black hole”, meaning that if you design a language close enough to Lisp, Lisp ends up dragging it in and the language becomes Lisp.

After that Tom Ball talked about JavaFX script and javac. This was quite interesting, the challenges of compiling something using the javac compiler does seem to be fraught with problems.

Charles Nutter made a good talk about the internals and interesting parts of the implementation of JRuby.

After that it was lunch and some open spaces talk about language interoperability. This is really a large problem and it was obvious that we don’t really know how to do this well between different languages on the JVM. The one solution is always go through the Java types, but this has the problems that the Java types are quite poor in comparison to some of the other languages.

Eugene Kuleshov gave an introduction to the ASM bytecode generation framework, which was very helpful – as it turned out at least half the people in the room were already using it.

Rob Nicholson gave an intro to IBM’s work on PHP for the JVM which seems to have many of the same problem as we have faced with JRuby.

Attila talked about his MOP and the directions it will take in the future, and this looks really nice. I’m looking forward to having some time to play with it.

Rémi Forax talked about his backport of JSR-292. I’m totally in awe about this. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to implement it. Very cool.

Rich Hickey did a very inspired talk about Clojure. Definitely one of the best talks – it includes loads of information, introduced the language in a good way and was generally very cool. I do have some opinions about the language itself, but I’ll save that for another blog post.

The last two talks of the day was about Python. The first one was about gradual typing for Python – this is interesting work and long term it would be interesting to see how it turns out. The Jython internals talk by Frank was also very nice and gave at least me some new insight into how their implementation actually works.

All in all a very interesting day.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: jvm language summit. | #

Just came back from the first day of the JVM language summit, and it’s been a very interesting day indeed. I made some bad morning choices – and spending some time fighting Notes – so I ended up arriving ten minutes into the first presentation.

The JVM language summit is a three day event organized by Sun, and the collection of people in the room is quite impressive. There are about 80 people all in all, and several huge names among them. Very fun.

So, the first talk was a quick intro to the Hotspot engine, what kind of features it sport and what we can expect from it in the future. (They’re adding a new GC algorithm, among other things).

After that John Rose talked about the DaVinci machine, and what specifically is part of the JSR292 work (invokedynamic and method handles mostly), but he also talked about other language features that might be nice to have, such as continuations, tail calls, value types and other things. During this talk Mark Reinhold said that invoke dynamic will be a part of Java 7, as I posted earlier.

Bernd Mathiske talked about the Maxine VM, which was quite interesting although I’ve seen more or less the same talk before.

After that there was time for lunch and open spaces discussions. I ended up in the same room as Terence Parr and some other people talking about Antlr. I made the bad decision to quickly tell them about a project I’m working on, and as a result I now have to actually finish it and publish it. Why can’t I just shut up? (Announcement will be posted shortly)

We got a quick intro to the Fan language, talking about some of the issues involved in supporting both the JVM and .NET from the same language. One of the large implications is that Java interop won’t really happen in such a language. Everything you use need to be implementation in the Fan standard library – at least that’s the impression I got.

Scott Davies did a classic introduction to Groovy. It was mostly geared towards Java developers and as such maybe weren’t a perfect match for the audience. He did make some good points from a perspective language designers/implementors don’t generally spend much time on.

Finally, Iulian Dragos talked about some of the ways Scala is optimized, how closures are compiled and what kind of compiler optimizations is done. This was really interesting, although I didn’t get the chance to ask about structural types.

The talk about Fortress was really interesting. If I was in the target audience I would be totally drooling, and as a language implementor it sure seems cool too. Implicit parallelism is hard to get right, but it sure seems like Fortress does it.

During the JVM multiple dispatch talk I sadly zoned out and worked on the project I’d mentioned to Terence. It seemed to be quite interesting, although I’m quite skeptical about the benefits of multiple dispatch in a language like Java. It doesn’t feel like methods should belong to classes in such a system.

Finally, Stuart Halloway hold a lightning talk about how different features of a language contribute to making it easy working in an agile way. Of course, calling it a lightning talk was a bit funny, since it ran to 30-35 minutes…

Looking forward to several session tomorrow. Goslings keynote might be interesting, Attila’s talk will be fun, and the talk about gradual typing in Python looks cool too.

4 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, jvm language summit. | #

First post from the JVM Language Summit. Mark Reinhold just stated that invokedynamic definitely will be in Java 7. This is obviously great news for anyone who cares about dynamic languages.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: invoke dynamic, java, jsr292, jvm language summit. | #