Interesting paper on Supporting Binary Compatibility with Static Compilation

Mon Aug 12 07:03:00 GMT 2002

Mark Wielaard writes:
 > http://flint.cs.yale.edu/flint/publications/bincomp.html
 > Supporting Binary Compatibility with Static Compilation
 > Dachuan Yu, Zhong Shao, Valery Trifonov
 > Department of Computer Science, Yale University
 > none of the ex- isting static Java compilers support binary
 > compatibility, because it incurs unacceptable performance
 > overhead. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective
 > solu- tion which handles all of the binary-compatibility cases
 > specified by the Java Language Specification. Our ex-
 > perimental results using an implementation in the GNU Java
 > compiler shows that the performance penalty is on average less
 > than 2%.
2% of _total_ runtime? That seems like an awful lot. Still, if it's
needed to achieve binary compatibility I suppose we'll have to live
with it. However, given my current interest in improving run-time
performance I don't like to see regressions.
Also, one of the great advantages of ahead-of-time compilation is fast
startup; we don't want to lose too much of that either. I wonder how
much of this could be done at like time.
Andrew.