Status

Current Release

The latest release is version 0.1.1. 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 0.1.1

Recent changes:

• Rewrote the JIT compiler to use machine registers more efficiently. The new compiler generates code which is:
  • 50-100% faster for CPU-intensive tasks such as decoding images
  • 25-30% smaller on average
  Most importantly, the new design is much less architecture-specific than the old one, making it easier to support ISAs besides x86 efficiently.
• Implemented Thread.getStackTrace. This method is especially useful for sample-based performance profiling.
• Added support for building Avian as a shared library on all platforms
• Various bugfixes and code cleanups

Next Release

The next major release will be 1.0. These are the remaining criteria for that release:

• Support Mac OS X on PowerPC (in progress - see powerpc branch in repository)
• Rework memory allocation in garbage collector to improve performance in low memory situations (see here for details)

Post-1.0 Ideas

• Experiment with optimizations and extensions to better support languages other than Java
  • Tail call optimization
  • First-class functions
  • invokedynamic
• Support additional architectures such as ARM, Sparc, and MIPS

Non-goals

Avian is not a complete Java implementation, nor is it intended to be. Thus, less-used Java features will only be added if they are easily maintainable and do not add significant overhead to applications which don't use them.

In particular, Avian does no bytecode verification in the VM and no security checks in the class library. Applications which run untrusted bytecode must therefore do their own verification and sanitation.