Development system with methods for just-in-time compilation of programs

In a development system for creating a program having methods comprising bytecode for interpretation by a runtime interpreter, an improved method for executing said program comprising:

• initializing a pointer associated with each method to point to a handler for invoking compilation of said each method;
• as each method is called at runtime, compiling each called method into native machine code stored at a particular location in memory, including mapping bytecode for a method being called into native machine code for execution by a target microprocessor, and storing said particular location for the called method in the pointer associated with the called method;
• as each method is compiled, for any bytecode instruction which comprises a call to another method, generating a native machine code call instruction to a memory address pointed to by the pointer associated with said another method, including generating a machine code call instruction for transferring execution of the program to code located at a memory address pointed to by the pointer associated with said another method;
• and
• executing said program wherein a call through a pointer pointing to said handler invokes compilation of the method associated with the pointer, and wherein a call through a pointer pointing to a method which has already been compiled leads to execution of the native machine code for the method associated with the pointer.

In a computer system for creating a Java program having methods for execution by a runtime interpreter, a method having an improvement for executing said Java program, the improvement comprising:

• compiling each method only when each method is first invoked at runtime, including mapping bytecode for each method being called into native machine code for execution by a target microprocessor;
• and
• for each method which is compiled and includes a call invoking another method, generating a call instruction through a pointer associated with said another method being called, including generating a machine code call instruction for transferring execution of the program to code located at a memory address pointed to by the pointer associated with said another method, said pointer storing a memory address for said another method if said another method has been compiled;
• otherwise, said pointer storing a memory address for a handler which compiles said another method into compiled machine code for execution by a target microprocessor when said other method is actually executed at runtime.