Interesting paper on Supporting Binary Compatibility with StaticCompilation

[Andrew Haley <aph at cambridge dot redhat dot com>]

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.