Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 10 years – creating applications for bioinformatics, finance, and retail.
However, Doug’s true interest has always been in exploring and explaining the low-levels inside the virtual machines that we use everyday. To make byte code more accessible, he created the open-source Java Assembler Kit (JAK) which provides a fluent API for producing Java byte code and includes a REPL to allow for interactive experimentation.
Recently, Doug moved to Sunnyvale CA to pursue his interest in VMs full-time as a VM Engineer at Azul Systems.
Today, we all benefit from the sophistication of modern compilers and hardware, but that extra complexity can also make it difficult to reason about performance.
In this talk, we’ll examine some surprising performance cases and learn how to
use profiling and benchmarking tools to better understand our modern execution environments.
HotSpot provides a variety of garbage collectors with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. To get the most out of our applications, we need to pick the right garbage collector and design to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its weaknesses.
In this presentation, you’ll learn about criteria for picking a garbage collector, how to measure GC performance, and how to write code that works with rather than against the GC.
