Joust: a platform for liquid software

The authors describe a Java-based platform for liquid software, called Joust, that is specifically designed to support low-level, communication-oriented systems and to avoid the limitations of general-purpose OSs. The authors contrast the platform requirements for communication-oriented liquid software with those of computation-oriented software, identify the limitations of current platforms, and outline the benefits of Joust. They also offer an overview of Scout (the underlying OS upon which Joust is built), its runtime system, and its just-in-time (JIT) compiler.