JET Update Amps Garbage Collection -- ADTmag

JET Update Amps Garbage Collection

By John K. Waters
February 11, 2015

Excelsior, a Russian maker of compliant Java Standard Edition (Java SE) implementations, has shipped an updated version of its flagship Java optimizer and native code generator, called JET ("Just Enough Time").

The spotlight enhancement in version 10.5 is new CoreBalance garbage collection (GC) technology, which the company claims it will greatly reduce stop-the-world pauses and overall memory management overheads in natively compiled Java applications run on multi-core CPUs.

GC pauses, a long-standing challenge for Java developers, has been called the Achilles heel of Java. The new CoreBalance GC is based on a new parallel garbage collection algorithm the company has been working on for seven years. It uses available CPUs and cores to reduce GC pauses.

"Over the years, Sun and Oracle engineers have developed so many different garbage collection techniques for the HotSpot VMs -- from Uniprocessor Train GC algorithm to Parallel Scavenge to (incremental) Concurrent Mark Sweep to Garbage First — that Oracle had to deprecate certain combinations in Java 8 and will remove them in Java 9," Dmitry Leskov, Excelsior's director of marketing, wrote in a company blog post. "And all these techniques have dozens of tuning options."

The Excelsior solution is built around an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler. It compiles Java applications into native Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux binaries, making it possible for developers to package them for deployment.

The new release also comes with support for Eclipse RCP 4.4 (Luna) and Mac OS X 10.10. The company is a longtime supporter of the Eclipse RCP. The enterprise edition of the JET product implements the Equinox Runtime core at the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) level, which "which effectively enables the AOT compilation technology for Eclipse RCP applications." The RCP is handled in other editions of the product through the JIT compiler that comes with the JET Runtime.

Excelsior JET has passed the Java Compatibility Kit (JCK) test suite, licensed from Oracle, and is certified Java Compatible on a number of platforms. It's available in Professional and Enterprise editions. Evaluation downloads are available here.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].