javar: A prototype Java restructuring compiler

This paper describes the prototype restructuring compiler javar, which can be used to make implicit parallelism in a Java program explicit by means of multi‐threading. Although the prototype does not provide a complete Java front‐end (unicode escapes are not supported and only limited semantic analysis has been implemented) and relies completely on the identification of ‘implicit’ parallelism by means of annotations, we hope that the research tool still provides sufficient functionality to make the parallelization of Java programs less complex and less error‐prone. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.