VMKit: Improving design and performance of Managed Runtime Environments

Current Managed Runtime Environments (MREs) are monolithic. Extending them to propose new features or reusing them to execute new languages is manpower intensive and difficult. We propose VMKit, an environment to ease the development of new MREs and the process of experimenting with new mechanisms inside MREs. VMKit is organized as a library that provides the basic components of MREs: a JIT compiler, a GC, and a thread manager. We have used VMKit to develop several MREs: a Java virtual machine, a .Net virtual machine and a secure OSGI execution engine. Our evaluation shows that performance is equivalent to their monolithic counterparts. Their language-dependant part represents only 4% of the total code, the rest being provided by VMKit. Thus, VMKit significantly decreases the time to develop MREs for new languages, without sacrificing performance.