FOSDEM talk about SableVM

[Grzegorz B. Prokopski]

Hi Mark and everybody,

I am attaching *introduction* (not an abstract, at least not this time)
to the talk I am going to give at FOSDEM [*] in Debian/Free Java room.

This may or may not make it into some prospective web page for Java
room - so it's just to give you idea what's in store. Beware - the
real meat begins near the end of this introduction :-)

Cheers,

                                Grzegorz B. Prokopski

[*] http://www.fosdem.org/ 21-22 Feb 2004, Brussels Belgium

PS: Crossposting to SableVM ML for obvious reasons, to GNU CP as the
forum where Java room at FOSDEM was actively discussed and to
debian-java, as we're to share room with Debian people (huh, I'll
have to share room with myself! ;-) and apparently the areas of interest
actually overlap.

-- 
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <address@hidden>
Debian GNU/Linux      http://www.debian.org
SableVM - LGPLed JVM  http://www.sablevm.org

Title: "SableVM - the Apache of Java Virtual Machines"

Recommended background: basic knowledge of Java and C.


       = = =   - - -   Introduction to the talk   - - -     = = =

SableVM is a robust and efficient Free (LGPL) Java Virtual Machine.

SableVM started - like many other free JVMs - as an academic research project.
But unlike almost every such project - the goal was NOT fixed on some specific
subset of Java features, instead - SableVM has been designed from ground up as
a *complete* Java Virtual Machine, with number of other robustness and
maintainability features, and with desired lifetime greatly exceeding inital
author's academic goal.

Today SableVM and its design are already proven to be outstanding in many
fields, like ex. portability - where medium time spent on port to a completly
new architecture is proven to be less than an hour, or performance of its
highly portable interpreter (written in plain C) comparable with handwritten
assembly-using, hardly-portable interpreters.

Probably a strong evidence of SableVM (now Project) vitality is that it will
soon feature SableJIT - a easily-retargettable Just In Time compiler, written
by different person than the initial author. Also during the last year a number
of people have contributed to SableVM and we hope this trend to incrase.

On the Free Software side - Project priorities and features are exactly what
one would love to be the case: the codebase is absolutely clean, we're able
and willing to offer repository write access to every contributor, we release
all our code under very permissive license (LGPL), we're of course glad to
help any new contributor grasp our code quickly (which isn't anywhere near
"hard"), we perceive close collaboration with other Free Software projects
(like GNU Classpath) as high-priority, we also have all possible helpful
project infrastructure one could imagine.

The SableVM codebase has many interesting features and implements many advanced
techniques. These features and techniques are often very unique, or they
justmake your life (as user or developer) much easier: m4 macros one can use
without m4 knowlege while preserving C syntax (and thus ex. highlighting),
inlined engine (a compiler w/o a compiler one could say), portable JIT, moving
garbage collector ability (yes, with JNI!), close integration with current
GNU Classpath versions, Java Invocation Interface, ...

That's where the real story begins...

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| For more informations see:                                                |
| * http://www.sablevm.org                                                  |
| * http://devel.sablevm.org/wiki/WhySableVM                                |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Speaker: Grzegorz B. Prokopski <address@hidden> is an active Free Software
  contributor and advocate. As Debian Developer he initially packaged SableVM
  and ported it to a number of platforms. Lately, SableVM became his main
  interest area, as a central piece of his Ph.D. research project.