The Independent/UK is running the Real State of the Union report.
A research project called DaCapo implemented a memory management toolkit in Java for the Jikes Java VM. This GC engine looks fairly good.
One of the fascinating things about Jikes's JIT engine is that it was completely written in Java. Absolutely mind-blowing. The upside is that many things can now be done in a higher-level language than C like JITing and garbage collection, the downside is that these systems are fairly heavy during compilation time and are best suited for server use and not desktop use.
A balancing act would be fantastic.
In Mono a few months ago we discussed a few possibilities on implementing more code in the managed world for the JIT engine. One of the options is to expose our current IR, and perform a few optimization in the C# world who could mutate the IR and keep the two existing layers: CIL to IR and IR to machine code to remain intact.
To make the above balanced, we could invoke the C#-based optimizations only conditionally, for example, when doing Ahead-of-Time compilation of code.
I turned the TV on, to Bush saying that abstention was the only way of fighting STDs, followed by an applause. Oddly, I was not tuned to Comedy Central.
Posted on 20 Jan 2004