Beautiful Architecture

A Brief History of Jikes RVM

Jikes RVM stems from an IBM project called Jalapeño. The Jalapeño project was started in November of 1997 with the goal of developing a flexible research infrastructure to explore ideas in high-performance virtual machine design. By early 1998, an initial functional prototype was bootstrapped and capable of running small Java programs. In the spring of 1998, work was begun on the optimizing compiler, and the project rapidly grew in size. By early 2000, project members had published several academic papers describing aspects of Jalapeño, and university researchers began to express interest in getting access to the system to use as the basis for their own research efforts.

By the time the system went open source in October of 2001, there were already 16 universities using Jikes RVM under license from IBM. This community rapidly expanded and now includes hundreds of researchers at well over 100 institutions. Jikes RVM has been the basis for over 188 papers that have appeared in peer-reviewed publications, and it has formed a foundation for at least 36 university dissertations.

Version 2 was the original open source Jikes RVM and had support for both the Intel and PowerPC architectures. A range of different garbage collection algorithms were available, including reference counting, mark-sweep, and semi-space. A year later, version 2.2 of Jikes RVM was released. One of the main enhancements was a completely new implementation of the memory management subsystem, ...