In Java, are static class members shared among programs?

Question

I imagine that no, they aren\'t, because every process has its own memory space, of course.

But how does the whole JVM thing actually work? Is there

Answer 1

Depends on the implementation, but yes there are ways things are shared. There is/was work underway to change that, and Sun (via Apple) has done a lot of work in sharing data between instances of the VM. There is a link that discusses some of that here.

To do any sort of sharing requires the VM implementor to do it, you as a programmer cannot do anything to make it happen.

The VM spec is here, there are some (older) books about it as well. You can also look at the source for Kaffe which is pretty small.