March 2003
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
27h 17m
English
The final form of extensibility that we will consider is in managing the services that are offered by a programming language runtime environment such as the Java Virtual Machine. There are many conceptual analogies between an OS and such a system: both are involved with presenting application programmers with an abstraction over the underlying facilities of a machine and in providing some form of isolation between its components. They differ in that the interface provided by software-based VMs is generally offered at a higher level, for example in terms of a bytecode instruction set with operations for method invocation, object allocation and so forth rather than for manipulating words in memory. The JVM has ...