Process virtual machine: Difference between revisions

A process virtual machine (also language virtual machine) is a virtual machine designed to run a single program, which means that it supports a single process. Such virtual machines are usually closely suited to one or more programming languages and built with the purpose of providing program portability and flexibility (amongst other things). An essential characteristic of a virtual machine is that the software running inside is limited to the resources and abstractions provided by the virtual machine—it cannot break out of its virtual environment.

A process VM, sometimes called an application virtual machine, or Managed Runtime Environment (MRE), runs as a normal application inside a host OS and supports a single process. It is created when that process is started and destroyed when it exits. Its purpose is to provide a platform-independent programming environment that abstracts away details of the underlying hardware or operating system, and allows a program to execute in the same way on any platform.

A process VM provides a high-level abstraction – that of a high-level programming language (compared to the low-level ISA abstraction of the system VM). Process VMs are implemented using an interpreter; performance comparable to compiled programming languages is achieved by the use of just-in-time compilation.

This type of VM has become popular with the Java programming language, which is implemented using the Java virtual machine. Other examples include the Parrot virtual machine, and the .NET Framework, which runs on a VM called the Common Language Runtime. All of them can serve as an abstraction layer for any computer language.

A special case of process VMs are systems that abstract over the communication mechanisms of a (potentially heterogeneous) computer cluster. Such a VM does not consist of a single process, but one process per physical machine in the cluster. They are designed to ease the task of programming concurrent applications by letting the programmer focus on algorithms rather than the communication mechanisms provided by the interconnect and the OS. They do not hide the fact that communication takes place, and as such do not attempt to present the cluster as a single machine.^{[citation needed]}

Unlike other process VMs, these systems do not provide a specific programming language, but are embedded in an existing language; typically such a system provides bindings for several languages (e.g., C and FORTRAN).^{[citation needed]} Examples are PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) and MPI (Message Passing Interface). They are not strictly virtual machines, as the applications running on top still have access to all OS services, and are therefore not confined to the system model.

Some virtual machines emulate hardware that only exists as a detailed specification. For example:

• One of the first was the p-code machine specification, which allowed programmers to write Pascal programs that would run on any computer running virtual machine software that correctly implemented the specification.
• The specification of the Java virtual machine.
• The Common Language Infrastructure virtual machine at the heart of the Microsoft .NET initiative.
• Open Firmware allows plug-in hardware to include boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers that will run on any kind of CPU.

This technique allows diverse computers to run any software written to that specification; only the virtual machine software itself must be written separately for each type of computer on which it runs.

• The design of the Inferno virtual machine by Phil Winterbottom and Rob Pike