A couple of interesting items in the news recently….
Recently, AMD announced a new feature which provides a light-weight profiler running in hardware on the processor. This is especially useful for a feature like Java’s HotSpot, which does dynamic re-optimization and re-JITting based on observed profile data during execution. One could use it in so-called "native" code as well, but lacking that built-in re-compilation at runtime feature, the effort would be rather higher.
Both AMD and Intel have new features designed to accelerate virtual machines. Some have speculated that future versions of Windows may run all apps in a VM as a security sandbox.
I find this convergence interesting: "Managed" applications running closer to hardware while "unmanaged" apps are virtualized. I had a conversation on one of the newsgroups recently about what "managed" means. Maybe a better question is what "native" means.
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