Entering the Compiler Space
Last week was my first week in the Java engineering group. It has been about 11 years since I took a compiler course (while in the CS MS program at BYU). A quick review of the history of Java was in order. Turns out I last used Java in 2012 in grad school. That must have been Java SE 7 from 2011 and Java SE 6 before that. Since I have not been in the compiler space since then, I have a steep learning curve ahead. That is the exciting thing about technology though – there is always more to learn!
I am currently a programmer in the developer division at Microsoft so it was helpful going through some of the Java development with Microsoft documentation for a high level overview of all our offerings. Also informative given my long absence from Java-land were the docs on how to Transition from Java 7 to Java 8 and from Java 8 to Java 11. It hadn’t yet dawned on me by the time I read through these that the reason references to 8, 11, and 17 keep coming up is because they are LTS releases.
As a newbie to the Java development world, I started by watching this 2019 OpenJDK Development talk on how to become an OpenJDK contributor. It is a great overview of concepts like project roles (author, committer, reviewer, etc), the contributor agreement, and (perhaps most importantly to me), how to find an issue to work on and build the OpenJDK. The breakdown of commonly used terminology and abbreviations was great to have as well.
For an introduction to the hotspot compiler, I started going through “A Simple Graph-Based Intermediate Representation“. I ended up watching Cliff Click’s talk on The Sea of Nodes and the HotSpot JIT before I got that far along in the paper. It was fascinating seeing details such as the CPU L1/L2 cache size playing into the design! Some of the concepts that I need to review after that talk include:
- SSA, Peephole optimizations, Register allocation
- Java’s type system (e.g. what is the significance of lattices or Hash consing?)
- Probably won’t hurt to comb through Engineering a Compiler as well.
The sea of nodes talk also revealed to me how little I know about companies in the Java space. I don’t think I had heard of Azul before, for example. In fact, it’s not just companies but also technologies! I was going through some build documentation when I ran into mentions of AdoptOpenJDK and Adoptium, both of which were foreign to me. I was glad though to see my old friend Eclipse doing well.
One of the most enjoyable things about being a programmer is working with very skilled people, especially watching them in action! I always learn a lot! My colleagues David and Mat were kind enough to pull me into their triage and reporting of [JDK-8277299] STACK_OVERFLOW in Java_sun_awt_shell_Win32ShellFolder2_getIconBits – Java Bug System so I could get my feet wet with how things are done in OpenJDK development.
The OpenJDK process is certainly different from the other open source communities I’ve been a part of (.NET and Mozilla Firefox). My manager and I poked around the bug DB to see what compiler starter bugs are out there. I picked bug [JDK-7077093] labelOper::label() should return Label& but since I must start out as an author, issues cannot be assigned to me. Unusual to me but the logic appears sound. Here is the query for C2 starter bugs.
Other highlights of the week were setting up my dev box to build the OpenJDK source code (unsuccessfully), discovering that compiler explorer is a thing (and an open source one at that), learning from my teammates how to investigate a failure of a fairly complex test on MacOS (they were using LLDB). I hope to write follow-up entries on these at some point.