Building Avian Java Virtual Machine

 

What is Avian?

Avian is an open-source, lightweight Java virtual machine (JVM) and class library designed to provide a useful subset of Java's features, suitable for building self-contained applications.

The VM is implemented from scratch and designed to be small and fast, featuring:

• Just-in-time compilation for fast program execution
• Generational, copying garbage collection to ensure short pause times and good spatial locality
• Thread-local heaps providing O(1) memory allocation with no synchronization overhead
• Null pointer dereferencing and arithmetic errors handled via operating system signals to avoid unnecessary branches
• Proper tail calls and continuations

& Best of it is

The virtual machine is designed to be embedded along with application classes into a single executable file, which can be run on systems where the Oracle Java platform isn't installed.

Supported OS: Windows, OSX, iOS, Linux, FreeBSD

Platform: ARM, IA-32, x86-64 & PowerPC

Let’s Build it for Windows.

What is needed?

1. MinGW or TDM GCC

2. MSYS

3. JDK 7 ( skip if already installed )

4. zlib

5. Go to Avian’s Github repository & download Avian’s source code in zip.

Introduction about Tools:

MinGW & TDM GCC provides gcc for windows (i.e. Windows port of GCC)

MSYS provides *nix environment on Windows like Bash shell, GNU Core Utilities...

Steps:

1. Start MSYS either by shortcut or go to MSYS install folder & execute MSYS.bat

2. Now you will see nice Bash shell console window.

3. Now set JAVA_HOME environmental variable to JDK directory & do not include bin directory. ( including bin generates build error )

E.g. export JAVA_HOME="C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.7.0_21"

4. Now first we need to build zlib, Extract zlib, cd to Zlib directory

5. Execute “make -f win32/Makefile.gcc BINARY_PATH=C:\TDM-GCC-32\bin INCLUDE_PATH=C:\TDM-GCC-32\include LIBRARY_PATH=C:\TDM-GCC-32\lib install”

Here replace C:\TDM-GCC-32\ with your Mingw or TDM install directory

6. Now we have everything to build Avian. Extract Avian to folder & cd to Avian’s directory.

7. Execute “make bootimage=true” & press enter.

8. Now if everything works fine then Avian is built under “build” folder

9. cd to Avian’s “build” folder, cd to “windows-i386-bootimage” , create your java program here

10. Now compile it with “javac -bootclasspath classpath <name>.java”

11. Copy “classpath.jar” from host to its parent directory means “windows-i386-bootimage”.

12. Now execute “jar u0f classpath.jar Hello.class” ( This will add your .class file to classpath.jar )

13. Now copy “classpath.jar” to embed directory.

14. Rename classpath.jar to boot.jar ( You can optionally see with archive manager that your .class file is added or not )

15. Execute “embed.exe output.exe boot.jar [package.]<classname>” ( [] optional part )

E.g. embed.exe hello.exe boot.jar Hello

Avian creates much smaller executables than GJC but supports limited API