Status
Current Release
The latest release is version 0.6. As of this release, everything
should work as advertised on the supported platforms. Please post
to the discussion
group if you have any problems.
Download Avian 0.6
Recent changes:
- Added support for Apple iOS on ARM and x86_32
- Upgraded OpenJDK port to version 7, which is now the minimum
supported version
- Modified AOT compilation code to export symbols for each
compiled method, making debugger stack traces much more useful
- Added support for hardware floating point instructions on
ARM
- Enabled use of LLVM Clang to build as an alternative to GCC
Future Releases
The next planned release is 1.0. No new features or architectural
changes are planned except as necessary to fix bugs and to improve
application compatibility for the OpenJDK port. The main goal is to
find and fix as many bugs as possible.
Post-1.0 Ideas
- Experiment with trace-based JIT compilation
- Improve ahead-of-time compilation using LLVM
- Add support for ahead-of-time escape analysis and bytecode
annotation to indicate where objects may be safely allocated on the
stack instead of the heap
- Rework memory allocation in garbage collector to improve
performance in low memory situations
(see here
for details)
- Experiment with optimizations and extensions to better support
languages other than Java
- Support additional architectures such as MIPS and 64-bit PowerPC
