Sunday, May 08, 2022

Jacobin JVM project after nine months

After nine months, Jacobin has been steadily moving forward. The biggest news of this quarter is that Spencer Uresk (@suresk on Twitter and suresk on GitHub) has joined the project. He's made his presence felt right away by rewriting how Jacobin loads JDK classes at start-up. Previously, we provided a curated set of JDK classes in the Jacobin distribution. These classes were searched for in the directory specified by JACOBIN_HOME. Spencer's improvement is that the classes are now loaded directly from the Java distribution on the runtime system. This means that if your system already has a JDK installed on it, all you need to run Jacobin is the single Jacobin executable file. Spencer has now turned his attention to running JAR files (because at present, Jacobin runs only individual class files).

While Spencer's working on that, I (Andrew Binstock) am continuing the work on the bytecode interpreter. Work is slow but steady and I aim to have it mostly complete by the end of this three-month cycle.

As of this quarter, we are compatible with classes through Java 17 (previously only through Java 11). We don't enforce sealed classes (Java 17's big new feature) but we can execute our test classes from Java 17 just fine.

By the numbers

Project size has risen from 17,588 lines in our codebase to 19,173, which consists of 6,383 lines of production code and 12,970 lines in 248 tests--a 2.003x ratio of test code to production code. We'll look to increase that ratio as we move forward. (It was at 1.4x at the three-month mark, and 2.10x at the six-month mark.)

How you can help

If you're interested in this project and you're on Github, we'd love a star. Knowing people are interested in Jacobin really helps keep our motivation and spirits high. If you're on Twitter, follow our handle (@jacobin_jvm). Thanks for your interest and support!