invokedynamic on OS X - Update

OK, so the big news is that the Sun guys (John Rose and co) have formally switched to working primarily off the bsd-port tree, rather than the mainline.

This has the advantage that as a lot of the people on mlvm-dev are on Macs, the patches should just work.

Based on this, I have also confirmed that at present, something appears to be preventing OpenJDK7 from self-hosting, ie that currently, on OSX at least you have to use Java 6 (ie SoyLatte) for builds.

Thus, the sequence is that of http://wikis.sun.com/display/mlvm/Building, but making sure that you start of with this line:

hg fclone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/bsd-port/bsd-port sources

if you're on a Mac - ie download the bsd-port branch, not mainline as the source base.

For the actual build step, ie the gnumake build line, I recommend that you adapt John's build script from here:

http://blogs.sun.com/jrose/resource/davinci-build.sh

The project should then build cleanly. If you do manage to get it to build cleanly on a Mac using an OpenJDK7 as the bootstrapping JVM, please let me (and the mlvm-dev group) know.

With all this in place, it should build cleanly. Install the resulting SDK somewhere sensible (I use /usr/local, labelled something like: openjdk7-sdk-darwin-i386-20090410).

This should now be available to be installed as a primary JVM for your Java IDE (I use Eclipse). You will have to explicitly enable MethodHandle functionality for now. In Eclipse, this is under Preferences > Java > Installed JREs. Highlight the new JRE, and click 'Edit".

Within the IDE detail, you need to add -XX:+EnableMethodHandles to the Default VM arguments.

With all of this done, you should be ready to test.

Remi Forax has posted here with a description of a simple test case.

Download the zip file from here and unpick it - if you've built a JVM as above, all you'll need is a snippet of the code in the src directory of the zip file.

Import the package fr.umlv.davinci.test into a suitable test project. It will not compile, because the class 'Magic' does not exist yet - there's no Java-language source representation of a dynamic invocation like: Magic.invoke(mh, element)

Instead, run the MagicPatcher class. This will generate a binary-only Magic.class file, which you should put on the build path of your project. Refreshing and rebuilding the Eclipse project and the IDE should now be happy, and you should be able to run MethodHandleTest.

For any Perl people who are here - the point which should leap out is the similarity of the second invdyn call (ie the one involving the Java Sum class) to a Perl closure. It's this ability which is motivating my interest from a Perl perspective in this area (I have other interests from a Java perspective, but that's another story).

Now I've got all this down on electrons, I'll move to trying to explain where my proof-of-concept baby-Per-lish dynlang is at, how I see possible approaches from here, and try to flesh out the slides from my talk a bit more so that they make a bit more sense without me talking to them.