Fast Bytecodes for Funny Languages
Über Conf
Denver · June 14 - 17, 2010
About this Presentation
There are several languages that target bytecodes and the JVM machine as their new “assembler,” including Scala, Clojure, Jython, JRuby, the JavaScript programming language/Rhino, and JPC. This session takes a quick look at how well these languages sit on a JVM machine, what their performance is, where it goes, and why.
Some of the results are surprising: Clojure's STM ran a complex concurrent problem with 600 parallel worker threads with perfect scaling on an Azul box without modification. Some of the results are less surprising: fixnum/bignum math ops take a substantial toll on the benefit of entirely transparent integer math and a lack of tail-call optimization gives some languages fits. Some of the languages can get “to the metal” and sometimes performance takes a backseat to other concerns. This session, for non-Java platform JVM machine users, is a JVM machine's-eye-view of bytecodes, JITs, and code-gen and will give you insight into why a language is (or is not!) as fast as you might expect.
CTO & Co-Founder of 0xdata
Cliff Click is the CTO and Co-Founder of 0xdata, a firm dedicated to creating a new way to think about web-scale data storage and real-time analytics. Cliff wrote his first compiler when he was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although my most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). I 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. Before that Cliff worked on HotSpot at Sun Microsystems, and am at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream.
Cliff is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences and has published many papers about HotSpot technology. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University and about 15 patents.