In this presentation recorded at QCon London 2008, Ola Bini talks about the current status of the JVM regarding languages running on top of it and the need to evolve in order to support dynamic languages.
Watch this video on infoq.com

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Neal Gafter discusses closures on the JVM. Topics covered include the JVM libraries, the challenges of running other languages on the JVM, language-specific wrapper/shim libraries, ways of making the JVM more language-friendly, whether lambda expressions are too hard, the history of closures, and forking the JVM to support closures.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/gafter-jvm-closures

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Charles Nutter discusses bringing JRuby to the JVM, why Ruby is hard to implement, JIT compilation, precompilation, core Ruby implementation, Java library method access, method call semantics, scopes, open classes, heap-based frames, library challenges, strings, regexps, I/O, green threads, POSIX features, C lib support and future plans.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/nutter-jruby-jvm-lang-summit

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, John Pampuch discusses the HotSpot compiler, the history of Java performance, HotSpot development philosophies and challenges, optimization, inlining, virtual methods, loop unrolling, constant folding, escape analysis, synchronization improvements, JVM library improvements, processor-specific optimizations, and tips for better performance.
Watch this video on infoq.com

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Rich Hickey discusses Clojure, which is an implementation of Lisp. Topics covered include Clojure features and syntax, example code, interoperation with Java, Clojure and functional programming, persistent data structures, concurrency semantics, references, transactions, software transactional memory, agents, implementation and pain points.
Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, is an independent software designer, consultant and application architect with over 20 years of experience in all facets of software development. Rich has worked on scheduling systems, …

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Bernd Mathiske discusses the Maxine open source research VM, Java compatibility, swapping out major VM components, Maxine research areas, meta-circular VM design, assembler usage, how Objects are handled, the common Pointer/Object interface, code examples, optimizing compiler features, snippets, bytecode generation, JNI and JIT.
Bernd Mathiske is a Senior Staff Engineer and the principal investigator of the Maxine project, creating a meta-circular Virtual Machine for the Java platform written in Java 5. Recently, Mathiske was instrumental in transferring the MVM multi-tasking technology from …