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 Jalape�o 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>
