Douglas Simon

Research Director, Graal Compiler

Douglas Simon

Doug Simon is a Director at Oracle Labs. He is currently a contributor to the GraalVM project with a particular focus on the Graal compiler and its integration into various runtimes (GraalVM, OracleJDK, Native Image) in various configurations (AOT and JIT compiled).

Between 2006-2012, Doug was part of the Maxine project, an open source meta-circular Virtual Machine for the JavaTM platform written in Java. The Graal compiler grew out of this project.

Between 2003-2005, Doug was one half of the team that developed Squawk, a CLDC compliant JVM implemented mostly in Java (including a generational garbage collector). Squawk was initially targeted at the next generation of Java Card systems. It was subsequently redesigned for slightly less resource constrained devices (e.g. low end cell phones) and became the underlying JVM for the Sun SPOT platform. Squawk includes support for multi-tasking, application migration and an execute-in-place bytecode format optimized for both space and fast interpretation.

Upon returning to Sun Labs full time in 2001, Doug co-founded a project to investigate secure, fine-grained dynamic provisioning of applications on small devices. He led the development of the SKVM, a prototype of these ideas based on the KVM.

During an internship at Sun Labs in 1998, Doug was part of the team that developed the Spotless system that initially ran on the Palm Pilot and later became the basis for the CLDC Reference Implementation.

Doug obtained a Bachelors in Information Technology from the University of Queensland in 1997, graduating with first class honors.

Publications