Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

This paper summarizes the Java Bytecode Annotations currently supported or under implementation in our Annotation-generating Java Bytecode Compiler (AJBC) and in our Annotation-aware JIT compilation system (AJIT). We explain the meaning of the annotation types, how they are generated by the Java Bytecode compiler, the formats for encoding annotations in the class file and how annotations are employed by a JVM engine (an interpreter or a JIT compiler) to produce high performance code. We analyze the potential benefits and costs of the different types of annotations and identify possible improvement and extensions.