How can a JVM be written in Java

Question

I was briefly reading about Maxine which is an open source JVM implementation that written in Java. This sounds circular to me. If java requires a virtual machine to run i

Answer 1

Here is a good paper on bootstraping a self-hosted VM. It's not Java, but javascript, but the principles are the same.

Bootstrapping a self-hosted research virtual machine for JavaScript: an experience report

Note that while bootstraping a self-host compiler and bootstraping a self-hosted VM are somewhat similar, I believe they do not raise the exact same challenges.