It's now quite common for embedded systems to run Linux on MIPS or PowerPC processors.
How well do Scala programs run on such systems ?
Obviously Scala requires a JVM - are good JVMs available on MIPS and PowerPC ? In particular are there JVMs that support JIT or AOT compilation ?
Are there any requirements beyond a JVM, the standard JRE library, and the Scala library ?
Thanks in advance,
Nick.
JamVM has full support for the Java Virtual Machine Specification Java SE 8 Edition on both Linux/MIPS and Linux/PowerPC. It is purely a JVM, in order for it to be actually useful, you need to pair it with a JRE. JamVM supports both GNU Classpath as well as the OpenJDK 6, 7, and 8 class libraries. It can also be used as a JVM inside IcedTea. It has an inline-threaded interpreter with stack caching that can give performance comparable to a simple JIT compiler, but it cannot compete with sophisticated high-performance JIT compilers such as HotSpot C2, Oracle JRockit, or IBM J9.
Chinese MIPS CPU vendor open-sourced an OpenJDK 8 port to MIPS two weeks ago.
The IBM J9 JDK naturally has support for Linux/PowerPC. Or actually rather for Linux/POWER.
A company named MicroDoc sells a MIPS port of Oracle Java SE Embedded 8 and a PowerPC port. I don't believe Scala runs on Java SE Embedded, though.