While at WRL, we wrote a JIT for the Transvirtual Kaffe system.
I started the JIT and an intern (Godmar Beck) finished it off.
The Java system was slow when it was just an interpreter, but with
the JIT, performance was pretty reasonable.
The largest overhead in running applications was actually decompressing
the JAR files. This took much more time than the JIT, indicating that the
JIT was under-engineered for optimization. Allegedly, the new kaffe JIT
is much better.
The biggest problem we ran into was stability in the underlying Java code,
which is more a problem with Kaffe than the JIT or java in general. The
progress with PocketLinux seem to indicate that some of these problems
are fixed, but the complication was that you have many apps running in one
image and corruption or deadlocks can hose things all around.
That said, we use the Java system to build a talking text editor (using DECtalk),
chess playing interfaces for crafty, email tools, stock ticker viewers, etc.
However, I think that Java has a number of limitations - I think you could do
much better with a machine portable system like Omniware/CEF where the "jit"
simply does machine translation and leaves other aspects of the language
(like type safety, storage allocation, etc) to a more flexible runtime system.
Received on Wed Sep 27 09:32:29 2000
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