airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien Opensource and JVM Ports
Apr 21, 2025
Volker Simonis, from the Amazon Corretto team and a former SAP expert, shares insights on the fascinating world of carnivorous plants, detailing their unique hunting methods. He dives deep into SAP’s struggles with Java integration and the complexities of porting Sun's Hotspot JVM across various platforms. Volker also discusses JVM internals, including inlining and deoptimization. His transition to Amazon and his interest in GraalVM highlight the evolving landscape of Java development and open-source contributions.
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Carnivorous Plants Variety
- Volker Simonis shares fascinating anecdotes about carnivorous plants and their diverse prey capture methods.
- He explains moving plants, glue-based traps, digestive fluid traps, and vacuum trap plants underwater.
SAP's JVM Porting Challenge
- SAP developed its own JVM to handle multiple Unix platforms efficiently.
- Volker joined the team to port Hotspot JVM to PA-RISC on HP-UX, despite complexities.
Assembly Needed for JVM Stack
- Porting the JVM interpreter requires assembly for low-level stack and call sequence handling.
- The rest of the interpreter is largely C++ switch logic, simplifying port efforts.