Interesting paper on Supporting Binary Compatibility with Static Compilation

Mon Aug 12 07:10:00 GMT 2002

Andrew Haley writes:
 > 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.
ARGH. I mean "how much of this could be done at link time." That
makes more sense, I think.
Andrew.