JVM concepts

Every aspiring JVM developer should be familiar with its most important concepts:

  • JVM is a virtual machine
  • Most implementations feature a just-in-time (JIT) compiler
  • It offers a few built-in primitive datatypes
  • Everything else is an object
  • Objects are accessed via reference types
  • The garbage collector (GC) process removes obsolete objects from memory
  • Build tools are used a lot in the JVM world