Paul H J Kelly (this is part of the thesis work of Kwok Cheung Yeung)
Imperial College London
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk

Veneer is a flexible runtime framework we have developed for implementing domain-specific optimisation for Java. It grew from a project to aggregate remote method invocations, but seems to be somewhat more general. It works as a "virtual JVM", running on top of a standard JVM. Most code runs unmediated, but control flow is intercepted at selected points to allow runtime optimisations to be deployed. Control flow is decomposed into fragments, which carry dependence metadata which can be combined with runtime information to inform optimisation decisions, in particular to re-order fragments.

The talk will cover Veneer's design, performance, and some applications. Veneer can be thought of as a rather powerful kind of aspect weaver, and the talk will conclude by exploring the potential for extending virtual machines with a plug-in mechanism for domain-specific optimizations.