The Java Virtual Machine Specification

Written by the inventors of the technology, The Java® Virtual Machine Specification, Java SE 8 Edition is the definitive technical reference for the Java Virtual Machine. The book provides complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the Java Virtual Machine. It fully describes the new features added in Java SE 8, including the invocation of default methods and the class file extensions for type annotations and method parameters. The book also clarifies the interpretation of class file attributes and the rules of bytecode verification.

Written by the inventors of the technology, The Java® Virtual Machine Specification, Java SE 7 Edition, is the definitive technical reference for the Java Virtual Machine. The book provides complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the Java Virtual Machine. It fully describes the invokedynamic instruction and method handle mechanism added in Java SE 7, and gives the formal Prolog specification of the type-checking verifier introduced in Java SE 6. The book also includes the class file extensions for generics and annotations defined in Java SE 5.0, and aligns the instruction set and initialization rules with the Java Memory Model.

Written by the inventors of the technology, The Java® Virtual Machine Specification, Java SE 8 Edition is the definitive technical reference for the Java Virtual Machine. The book provides complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the Java Virtual Machine. It fully describes the new features added in Java SE 8, including the invocation of default methods and the class file extensions for type annotations and method parameters. The book also clarifies the interpretation of class file attributes and the rules of bytecode verification.

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is the underlying technology behind Java's most distinctive features including size, security and cross-platform delivery. This guide shows programmers how to write programs for the Java Virtual Machine.

For nearly five years, one book has served as the definitive reference to Java for all serious developers: The Java Language Specification, by James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele. Now, these world-renowned Java authorities (along with new co-author Gilad Bracha) have delivered a monumental update. This completely revised Second Edition covers the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition Version 1.3 with unprecedented depth and precision, offering the invaluable insights of Java's creators to every developer. There is no better source for learning everything about the Syntax and Semantics of the Java programming language. Developers will turn to this book again and again.

The origin of this book goes back to the Dagstuhl seminar on Logic for System Engineering, organized during the first week of March 1997 by S. Jiihnichen, J. Loeckx, and M. Wirsing. During that seminar, after Egon Borger's talk on How to Use Abstract State Machines in Software Engineering, Wolfram Schulte, at the time a research assistant at the University of Ulm, Germany, questioned whether ASMs provide anything special as a scientifically well founded and rigorous yet simple and industrially viable framework for high level design and analysis of complex systems, and for natural refinements of models to executable code. Wolfram Schulte argued, referring to his work with K. Achatz on A Formal Object-Oriented Method Inspired by Fusion and Object-Z [1], that with current techniques of functional programming and of axiomatic specification, one can achieve the same result. An intensive and long debate arose from this discussion. At the end of the week, it led Egon Borger to propose a collaboration on a real-life specification project of Wolfram Schulte's choice, as a comparative field test of purely functional declarative methods and of their enhancement within an integrated abstract state-based operational (ASM) approach. After some hesitation, in May 1997 Wolfram Schulte accepted the offer and chose as the theme a high-level specification of Java and of the Java Virtual Machine.