hello?

Fri Oct 9 15:04:00 GMT 1998

Shane McDonald wrote:
>> I don't know if anyone has looked at HPCJ, the high-performance 
> compiler for Java from IBM's AlphaWorks. 

I found it at
http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/formula.nsf/system/technologies/287D1D6EAB4B712E882564AA007A592C?OpenDocument
I haven't used it, but I have a couple nitpicks:
- Platform support is narrow, basically only Intel:
 AIX, OS/2, Windows 95, Windows NT

 If it doesn't offer an escape from Intel, then spiritually it is not
 part of the Java revolution.
- It doesn't support dynamic class loading. Does GCJ?
 As I envision it, if I try to dynamically load a class that has been
 pre-compiled to .obj, then this should work. If the class is still
 .class bytecode, then I wish it would interpret or JIT it.
> What kind of performance should we expect from GCJ as
> compared to JDK 1.1.6 with a JIT?

Actually I think Sun's HotSpot JIT will soon be the leader to beat,
not Symantec's JDK 1.1.6 JIT. On one hand JIT will always have runtime
overhead that GCJ might avoid. On the other hand HotSpot's profiling 
ability (of which I know nothing) may allow optimizations based on
runtime history that are unavailable to GCJ. As a user, I don't care
who wins, so long as it makes Java competitive. GCJ's set of targetted
platforms will likely always bigger than that of Sun's.