1,471 research outputs found
JVM-hosted languages: They talk the talk, but do they walk the walk?
The rapid adoption of non-Java JVM languages is impressive: major international corporations are staking critical parts of their software infrastructure on components built from languages such as
Scala and Clojure. However with the possible exception of Scala,
there has been little academic consideration and characterization
of these languages to date. In this paper, we examine four nonJava JVM languages and use exploratory data analysis techniques
to investigate differences in their dynamic behavior compared to
Java. We analyse a variety of programs and levels of behavior to
draw distinctions between the different programming languages.
We briefly discuss the implications of our findings for improving
the performance of JIT compilation and garbage collection on the
JVM platform
JooFlux: Hijacking Java 7 InvokeDynamic To Support Live Code Modifications
Changing functional and non-functional software implementation at runtime is
useful and even sometimes critical both in development and production
environments. JooFlux is a JVM agent that allows both the dynamic replacement
of method implementations and the application of aspect advices. It works by
doing bytecode transformation to take advantage of the new invokedynamic
instruction added in Java SE 7 to help implementing dynamic languages for the
JVM. JooFlux can be managed using a JMX agent so as to operate dynamic
modifications at runtime, without resorting to a dedicated domain-specific
language. We compared JooFlux with existing AOP platforms and dynamic
languages. Results demonstrate that JooFlux performances are close to the Java
ones --- with most of the time a marginal overhead, and sometimes a gain ---
where AOP platforms and dynamic languages present significant overheads. This
paves the way for interesting future evolutions and applications of JooFlux
Fast and Lean Immutable Multi-Maps on the JVM based on Heterogeneous Hash-Array Mapped Tries
An immutable multi-map is a many-to-many thread-friendly map data structure
with expected fast insert and lookup operations. This data structure is used
for applications processing graphs or many-to-many relations as applied in
static analysis of object-oriented systems. When processing such big data sets
the memory overhead of the data structure encoding itself is a memory usage
bottleneck. Motivated by reuse and type-safety, libraries for Java, Scala and
Clojure typically implement immutable multi-maps by nesting sets as the values
with the keys of a trie map. Like this, based on our measurements the expected
byte overhead for a sparse multi-map per stored entry adds up to around 65B,
which renders it unfeasible to compute with effectively on the JVM.
In this paper we propose a general framework for Hash-Array Mapped Tries on
the JVM which can store type-heterogeneous keys and values: a Heterogeneous
Hash-Array Mapped Trie (HHAMT). Among other applications, this allows for a
highly efficient multi-map encoding by (a) not reserving space for empty value
sets and (b) inlining the values of singleton sets while maintaining a (c)
type-safe API.
We detail the necessary encoding and optimizations to mitigate the overhead
of storing and retrieving heterogeneous data in a hash-trie. Furthermore, we
evaluate HHAMT specifically for the application to multi-maps, comparing them
to state-of-the-art encodings of multi-maps in Java, Scala and Clojure. We
isolate key differences using microbenchmarks and validate the resulting
conclusions on a real world case in static analysis. The new encoding brings
the per key-value storage overhead down to 30B: a 2x improvement. With
additional inlining of primitive values it reaches a 4x improvement
Facets, Tiers and Gems: Ontology Patterns for Hypernormalisation
There are many methodologies and techniques for easing the task of ontology
building. Here we describe the intersection of two of these: ontology
normalisation and fully programmatic ontology development. The first of these
describes a standardized organisation for an ontology, with singly inherited
self-standing entities, and a number of small taxonomies of refining entities.
The former are described and defined in terms of the latter and used to manage
the polyhierarchy of the self-standing entities. Fully programmatic development
is a technique where an ontology is developed using a domain-specific language
within a programming language, meaning that as well defining ontological
entities, it is possible to add arbitrary patterns or new syntax within the
same environment. We describe how new patterns can be used to enable a new
style of ontology development that we call hypernormalisation
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