The JVM (Java Virtual Machine) edition of ActivePapers comes closest to the ideals of the ActivePapers project in terms of reproducibility and secure execution of downloaded code. The only restriction concerns reproducibility. The JVM specification does not fully specify the semantics of floating-point operations, in order to permit the efficient use of floating-point hardware. Programs containing floating-point operations may therefore produce different results on different machines. Note, however, that this restriction currently applies to all practically usable programming languages.
An important advantage of the JVM edition is its support for a wide range of programming languages. Its main inconvenience is the lack of popularity of the JVM for scientific computing. There is an insufficient choice of existing libraries in most application domains.
The development of the ActivePapers JVM edition is hosted on Bitbucket.
ActivePapers depends on the Java Virtual Machine, requiring at least version 1.6 (sometimes also called “Java 6”), and on JHDF5 (at least version 11).