I found this chapter terribly boring. I don't understand how anyone who's not building a compiler or VM would glean any useful information from this chapter, which will likely never be me nor the majority of this book's readers.
The only thing that I found noteworthy was the challenging of the idea that garbage collection is slower than memory management. The author asserts that not only do managed environments perform at least as well as explicitly managed memory models, but they may even perform better. This was based not only on the fact that automatic garbage collection is an advanced area of research in computer science that has been around for many years now but also on the fact that explicit memory mangers are much more likely to have problems with memory fragmentation.
One advantage of having the JVM be self-hosting is that communication between the runtime and its applications is made easier by the fact that they both use the same language and care share data structures and communication paradigms with no need for a translation layer.
If Jikes were rewritten today, it should be able to leverage the threading model of modern operating systems rather than having to implement a "green threading" model. The author says that "The primary disadvantage is that the operating system is not aware of what the JVM is doing, which can lead to a number of performance pathologies, especially if the Java application is interacting heavily with native code (which itself may be making assumptions about the threading model)." There is no need for this disadvantage given modern hardware and software support for multithreading, multicore, and multiprocessor systems.
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