Development on Jacobin, the JVM written in go that supports Java 11, has been proceeding rapidly. In the 100 days since the beginning of the project, there have been 314 pushed commits. I'll give more stats below. Here's where we stand:
Jacobin can read, parse, format check, and load class files. This process happens very quickly. For example, running all these steps on one of the largest classes in the JDK distribution, BigDecimal.class, takes just 2ms. When parsed, BigDecimal has 1567 entries in its constant pool, 37 fields, and 167 methods. That's a huge class!
When a class is loaded by Jacobin or any other JVM, it necessarily pulls in other classes to be loaded. For example, all classes run from the command-line have a superclass. Often, that superclass is java.lang.Object, which depends on other classes. Among these are java.lang.Class and java.lang.String; various I/O classes are needed as well. The OpenJDK-based JVMs (essentially, all JVMs except IBM's J9 and some embeddable VMs) address this need by preloading hundreds of widely used classes at JVM start-up. For a look at the list of all the classes loaded just to display the JVM version info, run this from the command line:
java -verbose:class -version
On my Java 11 test system, this command preloads 381 classes (in 347ms!) While Jacobin does not need as many classes loaded to run the specified class, it needs a subset of them. The next step in the project is to identify the required classes and load them quickly. To this end, loading opertions (parsing and format checking) will need to be done in parallel. Fortunately, one of the go language's strengths is a rich set of easy-to-use resources for precisely this kind of concurrent operation.
After this task is completed, work will begin on execution.
Testing Thoroughly
One of the principal goals of Jacobin is to be a reliable JVM. This requires disciplined work in the planning, development, and testing. Development is based entirely in tasks which are logged in a cloud-instance of JetBrains' excellent tool, YouTrack (graciously provide for free). You can see the presence of this tracking, in that every commit on GitHub starts with the corresponding task name. (Presently, the most recent task is JACOBIN-89.) Quality of the code is reviewed by automatic linters on GitHub. Currently, the code merits an A+. The goreport badge on the jacobin GitHub project, takes you to the most recent report.
Testing is done on a near-fanatical basis. Let me explain:
In 2005, I was a contractor with Agitar, a now-shuttered company that made a tool which would read a Java codebase and generate unit tests for missing areas of coverage. It worked great. In conversations with their sales engineers, they told me they used a back-of-the-envelope calculation to assess a company's commitment to testing. They compared the size of the test codebase to the production code. If the test codebase was 50% the size, the company had some commitment to testing. Over 80% was a clear and strong commitment to testing, and over 100% meant a deeply engrained testing culture.
The current code base of Jacobin consists of 8,342 lines (includes: code, comments, blank lines). Of those, 4,718 lines are in tests. That is, the testing codebase is 130.2% the size of the production code. The goal is to get that ratio even higher. Future quarterly updates will reveal our success in this effort.
Want to help?
It's always great to know a project is interesting to others. If Jacobin is interests you and you want to encourage its progress, a GitHub star is our preference. If you want to participate more directly, let me know in the comments, which are kept private. We also love code reviews, suggestions, and later on, we'll surely need folks to do testing. Whatever your interest, thanks for your time!
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