Understanding How Graal Works — a Java JIT Compiler Written in Java

Graal is a new JIT compiler for Java. It’s the part of the JVM that translates your Java code to machine code at runtime. One of the advantages of Graal is that it’s written in Java, so Java programmers can understand it.

If you think that a JIT compiler is an opaque piece of code in ancient C++ that you could never make sense of then we can show you how much more understandable it is than you’d think.

We can use standard Java IDEs and visualisation tools to help show you how your code goes all the way from Java bytecode down to efficient machine code. As long as you know Java you’ll be able to follow this talk.

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Chris Seaton, Oracle Labs

ChrisGSeaton

Chris Seaton is Research Manager at the Virtual Machine Group in Oracle Labs, where he leads the work to implement Ruby using the next generation of Java Virtual Machine technology and other projects, and a Visitor at the University of Manchester.

Before this he completed a PhD at the University of Manchester where he researched programming languages and irregular parallelism. Before that, he completed an MEng at the University of Bristol on languages with mutable syntax and semantics.

In his spare time he used to develop an award winning medical app that is the first app regulated as a medical device in the UK, and ran a consultancy to help clients such as the UK National Health Service to develop revolutionary medical software.

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