Newbie Qs

[KGB Software]

Hi,

I'm a newbie to the GCJ list.  I have a few questions.

I'm thinking of writing a floating-point intensive scientific
app in Java, but I'm concerned about performance.  There's no
GUI, so it seems like a good candidate for GCJ.

Does anyone have any feel for how big a speed hit (relative
to C, say) a GCJ-compiled Java program takes?  How does GCJ's
performance compare with other native Java compilers (eg.,
TowerJ)?

I've read one paper on Java performance in scientific apps
( http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~phlipp/javaCS.ps.gz ) that notes that
IBM's "high performance java" compiler has a flag to disable
array bounds checking, which results in large improvements in
scientific apps' performance.  Does/will GCJ also allow
array bounds checking to be turned off?

And Sun has made some changes to the FP rules in Java2 to allow
more optimizations.  Does GCJ handle these new semantics yet?

And when will GCJ be available to mere mortals?

Sorry to annoy y'all, but your project could be really valuable
to me!

Thanks,

John Kuszewski