What is Maxine?

The majority of software today is written in managed languages, and new languages continue to emerge, demanding high performance and scalable virtual machines. A flexible and extensible virtual machine is invaluable in researching new implementation techniques, new language features, and evaluating design alternatives. Yet as existing virtual machines have progressed in performance and functionality, their implementations have become unmanageably complex for all but dedicated product engineers.

Many years of experience have shown that the Java programming language and its development tools provide a major productivity improvement for application developers. Unfortunately, the popularity of Java as an application development language hasn't penetrated deeply into systems programming, particularly VM development. We would like to promote use of the Java language in managed runtime research and development and in systems programming in general. The Maxine project is exploring software designs, methodologies and tools that make VM development more productive.

Maxine is a VM designed for and written in the Java(TM) Programming Language with an emphasis on leveraging meta-circularity, componentized design, and code reuse to achieve flexibility, configurability, and productivity for academic and industrial virtual machine researchers.

For further information about Maxine including instructions on getting the source code, please visit the Maxine Wiki.