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  <title>VMKit: a Substrate for Managed Runtime Enviroments</title>
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<div class="pub_title">
  VMKit: a Substrate for Managed Runtime Environments
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<div class="pub_author">
  Nicolas Geoffray, Gael Thomas, Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller and Bertil Folliot
</div>

<h2>Abstract:</h2>
<blockquote>
Managed Runtime Environments (MREs), such as the JVM and the CLI, form an
attractive environment for program execution, by providing portability and 
safety, via the use of a bytecode language and automatic memory management,
as well as good performance, via just-in-time (JIT) compilation.
Nevertheless, developing a fully featured MRE, including e.g.
a garbage collector and JIT compiler, is a herculean
task.  As a result, new languages cannot easily take advantage of the 
benefits of MREs, and it is difficult to experiment with
extensions of existing MRE based languages.

This paper describes and evaluates VMKit, a first attempt to build a common
substrate that eases the development of high-level MREs.  We have successfully
used VMKit to build two MREs: a Java Virtual Machine and a Common
Language Runtime.  We provide an extensive study of the lessons learned in
developing this infrastructure, and assess the ease of implementing new 
MREs or MRE extensions and the resulting performance.  In  
particular, it took one of the authors only one month to develop a Common
Language Runtime using VMKit. VMKit furthermore has performance comparable
to the well established open source MREs Cacao, Apache Harmony and Mono, and is
1.2 to 3 times slower than JikesRVM on most of the DaCapo
benchmarks.

</blockquote>

<h2>Bibtex:</h2>
<pre>
@inproceedings{geoffray10vmkit,
  author = {N. Geoffray and G. Thomas and J.Lawall and G. Muller and B. Folliot},
  title = {{VMKit: a Substrate for Managed Runtime Environments}},
  booktitle = {Virtual Execution Environment Conference (VEE 2010)},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  year = {2010},
  month = {March},
  address = {Pittsburgh, USA}
}
</pre>

<h2>Download:</h2>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://llvm.org/pubs/2010-03-VEE-VMKit.pdf">VMKit: a Substrate for Managed Runtime Environments</a> (PDF)</li>
</ul>

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