From Manchester to Mountain View: Binary Translators, JVMs, and Android

About this episode

The episode features a conversation with Ian Rogers discussing the evolution of binary translation, JVMs, and various historical computing topics.

An airhacks.fm conversation with Ian Rogers ( @Ian Rogers ) about: ZX Spectrum 128K with rubber keys and a burning side grill, Basic programming competitions, REM commands as ASCII art, PC versus Amiga and Archimedes era in the UK, fractal landscape generators for Wing Commander 4 cut scenes, Ocean Software in Manchester and the Head Over Heels game, Manchester Baby and Williams tube as the first stored-program computer, Steve Furber and ARM origins at the University of Manchester , Cosworth and Pi Research Formula One telemetry, transputers and embedded PowerPC data loggers, dynamic binary translation with the Dynamite simulator, ICL 2900 emulation for the Israeli tax system, MIPS to Itanium binary translation for SGI machines, Transitive Corporation and the PowerPC to x86 product that became Apple Rosetta , the Steve Jobs era at Apple, Spark to Power binary translation and the IBM acquisition of Transitive, JDBC versus ODBC API design observations, java.util.Vector and java.util.Hashtable synchronization decisions, StringBuilder array copying overhead from removing synchronization, DARPA HPCS languages Fortress , Chapel , X10 , just-in-time parallelization from Java bytecode…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Bien

Guest: Ian Rogers

Topics covered

• binary translation
• JVM
• Android
• programming history
• computer architecture
• telemetry
• Java

Keywords

• binary translation
• JVM
• Android
• telemetry
• programming
• computer history
• Java
• ARM
• transputers
• emulation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ocean Software, Transitive Corporation, Apple, IBM, GNU Classpath, Apache Harmony, Oracle

Books & works: Wing Commander 4, Head Over Heels, Fortress, Chapel, X10, JikesRVM, Maxwell, Maxine VMS

Places: Manchester, Mountain View, UK, Princeton

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