[692] in java-interest
Re: java-interest-digest V1 #82
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Warth)
Thu Jul 13 13:53:54 1995
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 09:44:09 -0700
From: csw@scndprsn.Eng.Sun.COM (Chris Warth)
To: java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
>
> From: ekim@nyquist.bellcore.com (Michael Mills 21728)
> Date: Wed, 12 Jul 1995 17:21:47 -0400 (EDT)
> Subject: a dumb native code question
>
> Hi,
>
> There has been some discussion of converting Java bytecode to
> sparc assembler and to C++. I am a little confused. From looking at the Java
> white paper I have been under the impression that at some point
> Java would do this for me on the fly. Does the white paper imply that this
> will be a standard Java feature?
>
I think people are working on this issue because they find it
interesting and nothing more. Sun will eventually supply machine code
generators for a few platforms. Frank Yellin has done a lot of
infrastructure in the runtime to allow machine code and interpreted
code to coexist in an application, and he has been generating sparc
machine code for a while now. There are still some integration issues
to be worked out but the performance gain of compiled Java bytecodes,
as noted by Thomas Hickey, is very exciting.
It was kind of eerie to see Thomas Hickey's work on generating C-code
from the java bytecodes. James Gosling did an experiment like this
called java2c which basically did the same thing. That wasn't put into
the release because it doesn't really work as a Just-In-Time option,
but it's probably fun to do and I wish I'd thought of it.
Keep in mind that we really want to maintain platform independence of
java programs. Frank's changes to the class file format allow machine
code for multiple platforms to co-exist in a single class file. The
virtual machine code, however should never go away because it is the
ultimate recourse if you have a different architecture. Also in the
group here we have viewed machine code generation as fast process that
would be applied only to certain critical classes, after they were
integrated into a running system, hence the just-in-time name.
-csw
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