Presentation: "JVM mechanics: a peak under the hood."
Time: Friday 11:40 - 12:30
Location: Seacliff CD
The Java Virtual Machine is just that - a machine. The ways in which this machine actually performs the work you ask of it is often quite interesting, and sometimes surprising. Gaining an intuition into what executing your code actually involves can help you write better, higher performing code. Even more importantly, understanding what is NOT involved in executing your code can save days of wasted premature optimization work. In this talk, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems, and a JVM mechanic) will discuss examples of how the freedom this machine has in re-interpreting the meaning of code can have dramatic implications on performance and other code behavior. Gil will show examples of speculative, observation-based runtime optimizations that can often dominate the actual behavior of many code paths. He will demonstrate the importance of ordering and memory model rules in controlling optimizations, and discuss some of the basics of how the garbage collection "machine" functions, and the key elements controlling both efficiency and responsiveness in memory management. We will conclude with interactive Q&A on JVM mechanics.
