Question

I am wondering how this happens: how is a Java program mapped to an OS process (like the one shown for Linux below):

In C, it’s a straightforward association in how a program is written and how the whole call stack proceeds in the OS. I was wondering how is the mapping achieved in Java? Does a method meth(), called on an object: obj, just translate to locating the address of obj.meth() & from then on stack is used the way it is in C?

Thanks in advance!

Edit: I’d also be curious to know the model that other OOP languages use in general (C++, Python etc).

Answer 1

That’s a pretty complex problem. Here is a pretty good article about this topic. In short, Java got two execution modes which hugely affects memory layout.

1. Some code is executed by intepreter
2. Some code are compiled to native code for better performance.

See this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation.

And JVM got more type of memory region, like perm-gen, memory for JIT, etc.

This is well-discussed in other threads:

1. java and memory layout
2. jdk1.6 memory layout