Azul JVM Now Available For Developers of Open Source Applications | Hacker News Reader

Azul JVM Now Available For Developers of Open Source Applications

azulsystems.com

The title is incorrect: Azul are not open sourcing Zing JVM, they make it available for free to open source developers, but only for "development, qualification, and testing". Still nice though.

This is probably meaningless for most developers: it is only going to be made available "for use in development, qualification, and testing". Further, there's no information on what license this will be released under.

It's a shame, but given the amount that Azul has poured into research it is not surprising.

At least we can look forward to some interesting benchmarks and code analyses, perhaps?

As for the licensing, did Azul obtain a TCK from Oracle/Sun to say their JVM is for Java? If they did, it is unlikely they will open it up under a permissive license (e.g. MIT, BSD, Apache, etc).

One of Apache Harmony's big reasons for not obtaining and using the Java TCK is that it wouldn't allow them to release their JVM under the Apache license.

The announcement appears to make Zing available to open source projects, not to make Zing itself open source. Still potentially useful.

As at least some of you have figured out, the title is incorrect. Azul did not make Zing open source; we are just making free licenses available to developers working on open source projects.

Regarding performance, you can find some useful information on Azul's website. In a nutshell, Zing's strengths are its ability to GC while the application continues to run; and its ability to support very large memory heaps without a performance penalty. The two combine to permit a single JVM to do a lot more work and to avoid long application stalls when GC is triggered.

Any benchmarks between Zing JVM, Oracle JVM and OpenJDK JVM?

Trying to find where they say what license it's under, anyone have better luck?

Has anybody used this? Any hard numbers in comparison to reference JVM and VMs (jrockit?), latency vs realtime java?

EDIT: Looks like pretty much the same question everywhere. AZUL, please step up.

I believe we're somewhat constrained by our license with Oracle regarding what we can publish for benchmarks. But others are not, and this piece by Mike McCandless gives some good insight into what's possible with Zing:

http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2012/07/lucene-index-in-ram-w...

Oracle should just buy them already and make this the default for Java. The JVM GC pauses are becoming a real problem.

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