[Sablevm-developer] Extending SableVM with static stack caching

[Heinrich M. <ma...@he...>]

Hi!

As my master's thesis (I'm a computer science student) I want to
evaluate static stack caching. That's an interpreter technique where
you keep the top n stack items in registers to minimize the amount of
necessary memory move operations.

So what I'm planning to do is to take an existing JVM, run some
benchmarks, implement static stack caching (e.g. using vmgen), run the
benchmarks again and evaluate the results.

Therefore, I need a JVM that's (a) stable enough to run the benchmarks
and (b) has clean code so that it is easy to extend. As far as I can
tell from what I've read online, SableVM would be a good choice.

Now I thought I'd ask you a few questions before proceeding:

* What version should I use?

* Did someone already try some benchmarks on SableVM?

* Any other comments or suggestions?


Some other comments:

* "Stable" (as mentioned on <http://www.sablevm.org/getit.html>)
  doesn't seem to be available -- at least I couldn't find a link to
  it anywhere.

* The Wiki cannot be edited with IE or Opera. The reason is the
  <plaintext> tag that's used to display the LGPL. <plaintext> cannot
  be turned off (see RFC 1866: there is no </plaintext>) and is highly
  deprecated.

* Although <http://devel.sablevm.org/docs/INSTALL.txt> claims that
  only libart-dev is required for SABLEVM-CLASSPATH, you (also?) need
  libart-2.0-dev to configure successfully.

* I didn't really test it in-depth but SableVM seems to run well on my
  testing system (user-mode-linux on i386 with Debian sarge/testing).

Sincerely,
    Heinrich