JVM implementation tests

Question

I have been developing grails for some time now, and I keep running into platform dependent behavior. I have found bugs that only happen on legitimate versions of Windows and I have found bugs that only happen on one machine even if I reformat and reinstall some other OS and JVM. My most recent gripe, which I can reproduce on several machines but nobody else can is this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8884569/grails-println-only-works-sometimes-or-something

Is there some kind of testing or benchmarking suite I can use to see if my JVM is implemented correctly?

Answer 1

There is the Java Compatibility Kit that has got a huge amounts of tests for JVMs/JDK, but this may be overkill, and it might not be trivial to set up and run.

You have said that:

I have found bugs that only happen on one machine even if I reformat and reinstall some other os and JVM

How is your program printing out stuff? Is it to a GUI or console? If it is a GUI, it might be that there is a compatibility issue with your video card and Java's 2D hardware acceleration. It might be worth playing around with a few Java 2D system properties (try noddraw on Windows to turn off all acceleration, play around with opengl settings on 'nix).

Apart from that, you could try running the JVM in interpreted mode (slow!) with -Xint to see if there is a JVM bytecode compilation issue.