A JVM Does That??? by Dr Cliff Click

Cliff Click explains the inner workings of the HotSpot JVM, including JIT compilation, garbage collection, and class hierarchy analysis.

I worked on the HotSpot JVM for nearly 15 years, and I'm still constantly amazed as to what goes on inside them. High quality GCs, compilers, uniform threading & memory models, a cost model for code, dynamic code loading, introspection & reflection, access to the OS & hardware resources, a huge pre-built library. Where did all these services come from? Why are they here... and more importantly: when do they fail? What are the limitations we live with in the JVM? What services would we like to have (but cant & here's why)? Cliff Click is the CTO of Neurensic, and before that the CTO and Co-Founder of h2o.ai, the makers of H2O an open source math and machine learning engine for Big Data. Cliff wrote his first compiler when he was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although Cliff’s most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). That compiler showed the world that JIT'd high quality code was possible, and was at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream. Cliff helped Azul Systems build an 864 core pure-Java mainframe that keeps GC pauses on 500Gb heaps to under 10ms, and worked on all aspects of that JVM. Cliff is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences and has published many papers about Hot. [TLX-9575]