Analysis, Detection, and Exploitation of Phase Behavior in Java Programs

The Java programming language offers developers many productivity enhancing features, including high-level abstractions, extensive libraries, architecture-independent execution, and type safety. These features are enabled by an intelligent execution environment that, incrementally and dynamically, compiles and executes compact representations of Java programs encoded for a virtual machine. While this necessarily adds overhead, the ability to compile (and recompile) code at runtime also enables the execution environment to perform dynamic, performance-enhancing optimizations based on the runtime behavior of the executing program.