Interesting paper on Supporting Binary Compatibility with Static Compilation

[Andrew Haley]

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.

Andrew.