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Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

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Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#31
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to add a delete keyword? Are you trying to add explicit memory management to simplify the work of the garbage collector?

One example would be game development, where people end up doing object pooling to avoid GC pauses dropping frames.

There are better ways to eliminate GC pauses than manual memory management (even ignoring the relatively new "pauseless" GCs). See the new RTSJ (realtime Java) specification here: https://www.aicas.com/cms/en/rtsj. Not that it's designed for far stricter requirements than games (cases where even microseconds of unexpected latency may result in actual life safety concerns).

Manual memory management is a good choice if you have both worst-case latency concerns as well as very restricted RAM and/or severe energy constraints (basically, the kind of applications that Rust was designed to handle).

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#32
post #27

Wonder if it will be possible to compile under OS X. Curiously OS X binaries have never been available for J9.

Eclipse OpenJ9 builds on top of Eclipse OMR. Eclipse OMR has OS X builds ... What a great thing it would be to have OpenJ9 building and running on OS X :) !

Disclaimer: I am a project lead for both Eclipse OpenJ9 and Eclipse OMR.

OS X has been talked about, but we have a lot of plumbing to connect up at the project right now and that has high priority for us. If someone wants to kick that work off, I would happily encourage it :) .

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#34

Will a Java expert (JVM developer) please answer this question? Thank you. How impossible would it be to add a delete keyword to the JVM, and why?

It's not impossible. HotSpot/OpenJDK already has one. It's a native method/compiler intrinsic rather than a keyword but amounts to the same thing:

http://www.docjar.com/docs/api/sun/misc/Unsafe.html#freeMemo...

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#35
post #27

Wonder if it will be possible to compile under OS X. Curiously OS X binaries have never been available for J9.

Eclipse OpenJ9 builds on top of Eclipse OMR. Eclipse OMR has OS X builds ... What a great thing it would be to have OpenJ9 building and running on OS X :) ! Disclaimer: I am a project lead for both Eclipse OpenJ9 and Eclipse OMR. OS X has been talked about, but we have a lot of plumbing to connect up at the project right now and that has high priority for us. If someone wants to kick that work off, I would happily en…

I opened an issue where discussion on OS X support can happen: https://github.com/eclipse/openj9/issues/36

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example would be game development, where people end up doing object pooling to avoid GC pauses dropping frames.

There are better ways to eliminate GC pauses than manual memory management (even ignoring the relatively new "pauseless" GCs). See the new RTSJ (realtime Java) specification here: https://www.aicas.com/cms/en/rtsj . Not that it's designed for far stricter requirements than games (cases where even microseconds of unexpected latency may result in actual life safety concerns). Manual memory management is a good choice i…

The RTSJ solution is to simply pre-allocate everything you could ever want and reuse that.

That’s horrible to use for game development.

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#37
post #27

Wonder if it will be possible to compile under OS X. Curiously OS X binaries have never been available for J9.

Eclipse OpenJ9 builds on top of Eclipse OMR. Eclipse OMR has OS X builds ... What a great thing it would be to have OpenJ9 building and running on OS X :) ! Disclaimer: I am a project lead for both Eclipse OpenJ9 and Eclipse OMR. OS X has been talked about, but we have a lot of plumbing to connect up at the project right now and that has high priority for us. If someone wants to kick that work off, I would happily en…

It's always nice to see project members in threads like this. Thanks!

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to add a delete keyword? Are you trying to add explicit memory management to simplify the work of the garbage collector?

One example would be game development, where people end up doing object pooling to avoid GC pauses dropping frames.

You could also check out Eclipse OpenJ9's -Xgcpolicy:metronome option. It only works on Linux X86-64 at the moment, but it is designed to better regulate GC pauses. If you want to learn more, you can open an issue to ask for more details at https://github.com/eclipse/openj9/issues .

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#39

Will a Java expert (JVM developer) please answer this question? Thank you. How impossible would it be to add a delete keyword to the JVM, and why?

It's not impossible. HotSpot/OpenJDK already has one. It's a native method/compiler intrinsic rather than a keyword but amounts to the same thing: http://www.docjar.com/docs/api/sun/misc/Unsafe.html#freeMemo...

That frees a block of native memory, not an arbitrary Java object...

Re: Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM

#40

That's awesome. It was always some weird situation with abstract JVM specification but only one de-facto standard implementation which everyone used. I hope J9 will be a viable alternative, so everyone wins.

How so? There was BEA JRockIT, IBM J9, Azuul, Oracle and HP also have a JVM iirc.
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