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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.