Proposal: zero-assembler port of OpenJDK

[Gary Benson]

Jonathan Springer wrote:
> Gary Benson wrote:
> > I'm Gary Benson, an engineer at Red Hat.  Over the past year or
> > so I've been working on a port of OpenJDK that uses no assembler
> > and therefore can trivially be built on any system.
> >
> > The port, known as zero, is presently an interpreter-only port,
> > and is known to work on PowerPC (32- and 64-bit), x86-64, IA-64,
> > and zSeries.  An LLVM-based JIT, known as Shark, is currently
> > under development.  Currently only Linux is supported, but
> > adding support for other operating systems is one area in which
> > I'd particularly welcome contributions.
> >
> > The goal of this project would be to be able to build a TCK-
> > compliant OpenJDK of reasonable performance on any platform
> > with no additional porting work.
> 
> I think this is very useful work, and would make a great project.
> 
> So this project is intended to include the Shark work?  What kind
> of machine customization is required there, is it all internal to
> LLVM?

The Shark work would definitely be included, yes, though of course
it's possible to build without in on platforms without LLVM JIT
support.  And yes, the machine customization is all internal to LLVM,
for Shark at least.  Some platforms there are JITs already: IA-32,
x86-64, 32- and 64-bit PowerPC, Alpha and ARM.  Other platforms have
LLVM interpreter support (IA-64, MIPS, SPARC) but no JIT; I presume
writing a JIT for those would be easier than other platforms where
you'd have to start from scratch.

Cheers,
Gary

-- 
http://gbenson.net/