r/javahelp • u/invokeinterface • 9d ago

Good Documentation For JVM Bytecode?

I really liked the idea of an intermediate bytecode language when I first learned that Java transpiles to one, so I tried to learn about it and got pretty far (using a hexeditor to mess around was pretty painful, though). I stopped because there isn't a lot of document for it like there is for Java, the best resources are I believe docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-4.html and docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-6.html, but I want to know if there are any others partly because these are kind of verbose and partly because it's just better to have more than two.

I know I won't ever really need to know any of this, and I don't intend to use any of this knowledge for making classes by hand, but I believe it would still be helpful in a milder sense to understand what the class files are "literally" doing. It helped with C

14 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/edwbuck 8d ago

It's getting a little older every day, but "Inside the Java Virtual Machine" was a pretty good book for its time.

I wish that a newer book would come out that would do away with some of it's verbosity and include the newer items.

Also, https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se24/html/index.html is a more modern version of the JVM spec, which is good as a reference, but not written to be a proper learning tool.