History
HotSpot, first released April 27, 1999, was based on technologies from the Strongtalk implementation of the Smalltalk programming language originally developed by Longview Technologies, LLC which was doing business as Animorphic. Animorphic's virtual machine technology had earlier been successfully used in a Sun research project, the Self programming language. In 1997, Animorphic was purchased by Sun Microsystems.
Shortly after acquiring Animorphic, Sun also hired Dr. Cliff Click to write a new just-in-time (JIT) compiler for the newly developed virtual machine. This new compiler would be the source of the name "HotSpot", which derives from the fact that as it runs Java bytecode, it continually analyzes the program's performance for "hot spots" which are frequently or repeatedly executed. These are then targeted for optimization, leading to high performance execution with a minimum of overhead for less performance-critical code. In some cases, it is possible for adaptive optimization of a JVM to exceed the performance of hand-coded C++ or C code.
Initially available as an add-on for Java 1.2, HotSpot became the default Sun JVM in Java 1.3.
Read more about this topic: Hot Spot
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