Introduction of Alhambra project

[Irina Arkhipets]

Hi All,

My name is Irina Arkhipets, I work for Unipro NCIT company located in
Novosibirsk, Russia.


We've just signed the OCA license, so I think now it's time to introduce
ourselves here.

Our company has a long history of work in core Java technologies since
early days of the Java platform. In collaboration with Sun Microsystems we
started developing certification tests for JDK in 1996; our engineers
contributed to initial versions of the JVM specifications and later on took
part in implementation of Apache Harmony runtime. Nowadays, the main
specialization of our company continues to be compiler technologies,
optimization and tuning various kinds of applications and computational
libraries.

Our particular interest is in finding most efficient ways of porting latest
OpenJDK to new platforms, we assume it should be possible to port
optimizing JIT compiler without introducing lots of platform specific
helpers and custom codegens. Of course we're aware of Zero/Shark project
experience, initially we considered to restore it and even implemented it
for Java 8. After some experiments and performance analysis, we believe
that a better solution would be to combine the Opto JIT front-end and its
elaborated Java-specific platform-independent optimizations with power of
modern LLVM back-end. Therefore, we propose the Alhambra project to develop
such a  JIT compiler.

We are going to base it on OpenJDK 11 since it's a recent stable LTS
version, however I am not quite sure that it's still open for the new
features.

If anybody else works in the same direction or just has some interest in
the same area - we would be happy to cooperate.

Cheers,
Irina