This chapter is I believe, the most detailed of the the other virtual machine implementations that we have seen before in the course. More now than before, I am able to appreciate the practical benefits of using Java, and its features like modularity, the availability of several user-contributed libraries and the supporting tools. Reading Jikes which is a virtual machine written in Java and hosted in Java's own runtime environment was an eye-opener in itself and is quite different from the other VMs we have encountered earlier in class. One of the interesting features of Jikes which I liked is the extensibility aspect. Among the several other benefits of Jikes which are mentioned in passing, the one which caught my eye was the creation of an entire operating system based on the Jikes virtual machine. I am not sure how feasible this is, and would love to know more about this. Also, more than just an academic experiment, there do not seem to be any other advancements in Jikes (If I am not wrong).
I also came across this paper which describes the use of debuggers for meta-circular VMs. Since Jikes is written in Java and is platform-independent, the authors argue that Hybrid-debuggers which make use of high-level platform-independent details along with access to platform-specific code would be the ideal debuggers for such VMs. Overally this paper was a nice read, though we could have avoided reading more of the implementation specifics and focused on the architecture as a whole.
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