Da Vinci Machine - History

History

The Java Virtual Machine currently has no built-in support for dynamically typed languages:

  • The existing JVM instruction set is statically typed.
  • JVM has limited support for dynamically modifying existing classes and methods. It currently works only in a debugging environment.

JSR 292 (Supporting Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform) proposes to:

  • add a new invokedynamic instruction at the JVM level, to allow method invocation relying on dynamic type checking,
  • to be able to change classes and methods at runtime dynamically in a production environment.

Following the success of the JRuby Java implementation, the Da Vinci project was started at the end of January 2008. The capabilities experimented by Da Vinci are planned to be added to Java 7. It aims to prototype this JSR, but also other lower-priority extensions. The first working prototype, developed as a patch on OpenJDK, was announced and made available on end of August 2008.

Since then, the JRuby team has successfully wired dynamic invocation in their codebase. Dynamic invocation shipped with the 1.1.5 release, and will be disabled on JVMs without invokedynamic capabilities.

Since then, part of the project has already been integrated in the upcoming JDK 7 codebase. and integrated in the Java 7 release.

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