http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/jikesrvm/ <SNIP> The JikesT Research Virtual Machine (Jikes RVM) provides the academic and research communities with a flexible open testbed to prototype new virtual machine technologies and experiment with a large variety of design alternatives. The virtual machine infrastructure in the Jikes RVM release was independently developed over the last four years as part of the Jalapeño research project at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
The Jikes RVM runs on AIXT/PowerPCT, Linux©/PowerPC and Linux/IA-32 platforms and includes state-of-the-art virtual machine technologies for dynamic compilation, adaptive optimization, garbage collection, thread scheduling and synchronization. A distinguishing characteristic of the Jikes RVM is that it is implemented in the JavaT programming language and is self-hosted i.e., its Java code runs on itself without requiring a second virtual machine. In contrast, almost all other virtual machines for the Java platform are either written in native code (typically, C or C++) or written in the Java programming language with a reliance on a second underlying virtual machine to execute its Java code. A Java implementation provides ease of portability, and a seamless integration of virtual machine and application resources such as objects, threads, and operating-system interfaces. ... </SNIP>
