hello?

[Shane McDonald]

> I consider GCJ to be one of the most important projects in software
> today.  I too am puzzled by the absence of traffic here; don't we know a
> pending breakthrough when we see one?  I look forward to email in this
> list someday announcing the ability to generate executables without java
> source, without fees, and without restrictions as to which of the major
> platforms can be targetted.

  I don't want anyone to get me wrong -- I'm really excited about GCJ, and I
definitely think it's the way to go, especially for the reasons listed
above.  I do have one question, though.

  I don't know if anyone has looked at HPCJ, the high-performance compiler
for Java from IBM's AlphaWorks.  I've only used it on NT briefly, but in the
one benchmark test I ran on it, which does a bunch of mathematical
manipulations to an array of floats, I found the executable I produced
actually ran slower (118 seconds as opposed to 96 seconds) as when the
program was run with the JIT in JDK 1.1.6.

  Now, I don't know anything about HPCJ, and this result makes absolutely no
sense to me, but what kind of performance should we expect from GCJ as
compared to JDK 1.1.6 with a JIT?  I'm trying to convince the great unwashed
here to move to Java, but they keep harping on performance.

Shane McDonald