ROromwell·Dec 27, 2017
>JVM
Well, here's a Java Virtual Machine written in Java: https://github.com/beehive-lab/Maxine-VM
Not to counter your point, but to keep the discussion going :)_
In DARPA's “Unhackable” Computerbeehive-lab
Maxine-VM
Java2017–2017
beehive-lab / Maxine-VM
Maxine-VM
Maxine VM: A meta-circular research VM
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
340GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Maxine VM: A meta-circular research VM
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by week3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-11-23 20:11:05 UTC to 2017-12-27 06:05:36 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 20 | 2017-11-20 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-11-27 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Nov 27 | 2017-11-27 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-12-04 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 4 | 2017-12-04 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-12-11 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 11 | 2017-12-11 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-12-18 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 18 | 2017-12-18 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-12-25 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 25 | 2017-12-25 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesThis is a "meta-circular VM".
It's a Java program that interprets JVM bytecode. Since the Java program itself is running on the JVM, it actually uses the underlying JVM to do a lot of the work.
This means you get a relatively fast VM but it will be a lot easier to code and debug than using a systems programming language like C++.
But why?
- The original paper (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2400689&dl=ACM&coll=DL) thought of Maxine as "a highly approachable VM research platform and a productive basis for research and teaching." You can see on the roadmap (https://github.com/beehive-lab/Maxine-VM/wiki#roadmap) that they're exploring the cutting edge of VM research.
- I do a lot of tricky network programming - threads and IO. I'd love to have a VM which I could exactly control the threading and IO behaviour so that I could test tricky s
Read the rest
ituations. If this VM is easy to embed in my programs and runs fast enough then it would be fascinating to try it out for writing testing code.
Maxine VM: A Metacircular VM for Java in Java
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