Characteristics of Dynamic JVM Languages

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has become an execution platform targeted by many programming languages. How-ever, unlike with Java, a statically-typed language, the per-formance of the JVM and its Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler with dynamically-typed languages lags behind purpose-built language-specific JIT compilers. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the workloads imposed on the JVM by dynamic languages. We use various metrics to characterize the dynamic behavior of a variety of programs written in three dynamic languages (Clojure, Python, and Ruby) executing on the JVM. We identify the differences with respect to Java, and briefly discuss their implications. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.4 [Performance o