Lars Bak, Sun Microsystems Inc.

Lars Bak received the MS degree in computer science from Aarhus University in 1988. As one of the founders of Mjølner Informatics, he participated in the design and implementation of the Beta Mjølner System. In 1991, he joined the Self group at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. During his time there, he developed a programming environment for Self and added several enhancements to the virtual machine. In 1994, he joined Longiew Technologies LLC, where he designed and implemented high performance virtual machines for both Smalltalk and Java. Longview was acquired by Sun Microsystems, Inc. in 1997. Lars has been the engineering manager and technical lead in the HotSpot team and is presently a member of the HotSpot team at Java Software Division, Sun Microsystems, Inc. A major attraction of the JavaTM programming language is that it provides automatic memory management. This frees the programmer from inserting explicit memory de-allocation statements into programs and helps guarantee safe execution semantics. Traditionally, garbage collection has been considered an inefficient process that slows down program execution and introduces disruptive pauses. The Java HotSpotTM virtual machine addresses these problems by employing state-of-the-art garbage collection techniques ensuring fast allocation and non-disruptive pauses. This results in improved throughput and responsiveness for enterprise server applications and pause-less interactive applications. This session will describe different garbage collection strategies and discuss their impact on program performance and behavior. The rationale for the design of the memory management for the Java HotSpot virtual machine will be discussed, followed by a description of improvements in upcoming versions. Tuesday 14:00 - 15:00