IKVM.NET is an implementation of

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

for

Mono Mono may refer to: Common meanings * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monaural, monophonic sound reproduction, often shortened to mono * Mono-, a numerical prefix representing anything single Music Performers * Mono (Japanese ...

and the

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

. IKVM is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

, distributed under the

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also a ...

permissive free software license A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...

. The original developer, Jeroen Frijters, discontinued work on IKVM in 2015. In 2018,

Windward Studios Windward Studios is a software development company based in Boulder, Colorado. The company began in 1996 with the release of Enemy Nations, a popular Real-Time strategy game, before focusing on its reporting software program Windward Reports. 1 ...

forked IKVM.NET to continue development on the open-sourced IKVM. In 2022 Jerome Haltom and others picked up the work on a new

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

organization and finished

.NET Core The domain name net is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used in the Domain Name System of the Internet. The name is derived from the word ''network'', indicating it was originally intended for organizations involved in networking technologies ...

support.

Components

IKVM.NET includes the following components: * A

Java virtual machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describ ...

(JVM) implemented in .NET * A .NET implementation of the Java class libraries * A tool that translates Java bytecode ( JAR files) to .NET IL ( DLLs or

EXE file .exe is a common filename extension denoting an executable file (the main execution point of a computer program) for Microsoft Windows, OS/2, and DOS. File formats There are numerous file formats which may be used by a file with a extensio ...

s). * Tools that enable Java and .NET interoperability IKVM.NET can run compiled Java code (

bytecode Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (norma ...

) directly on Microsoft .NET or Mono. The bytecode is converted on the fly to CIL and executed. By contrast J# is a Java syntax on the .NET framework, whereas IKVM.NET is effectively a Java framework running on top of the .NET framework. Jeroen Frijters was the main contributor to IKVM.NET. He is Technical Director of Sumatra Software, based in the Netherlands.

Name

The "IKVM" portion of the name is a play on "

JVM A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describes ...

" in which the author "just took the two letters adjacent to the J".

Status

, the machine supported Java 1.6. AWT and Swing are partially supported. IKVM uses

OpenJDK OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006. The implementation is licensed under the GPL-2.0-only ...

as its class library. IKVM has limited support for

Abstract Window Toolkit The Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) is Java's original platform-dependent windowing, graphics, and user-interface widget toolkit, preceding Swing. The AWT is part of the Java Foundation Classes (JFC) — the standard API for providing a graphica ...

(AWT). For this reason, it cannot run

ImageJ ImageJ is a Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI, University of Wisconsin). Its first version, ImageJ 1.x, is developed in the publ ...

and other apps that depend on AWT. Implementing AWT in IKVM.NET is a low priority. IKVM 8 implements

Java 8 The Java language has undergone several changes since JDK 1.0 as well as numerous additions of classes and packages to the standard library. Since J2SE 1.4, the evolution of the Java language has been governed by the Java Community ...

. The IKVM organization also maintains IKVM.Maven.Sdk, an extension to the .NET PackageReference system that allows direct references to and transpiling of Maven artifacts. IKVM.Maven.Sdk is also available on NuGet.org.

References

External links

*
IKVM.NET wiki
Java virtual machine Mono (software) Cross-platform free software {{prog-lang-stub

Components

Name

Status

See also

References

External links