This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by James Gosling. Original Post: Java Urban Performance Legends Feed Title: James Gosling: on the Java road... Feed URL: /jag/feed/entries/rss?cat=%2FJava Feed Description: I've been inescapably tagged as "the Java guy", despite the fact that I havn't worked in the Java product organization for a couple of years (I do still kibbitz). These days I work at Sun's research lab about two thirds of the time, and do customer visits and talks the other third. For more detail... Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by James Gosling Latest Posts From James Gosling: on the Java road...

There was a funny incident at a recent developer event where some folks had a booth where they where demo-ing a high end industrial strength C compiler and had a benchmark that they had transliterated into Java. They were comparing their compiler to GCC and Java. GCC was running at about 2/3 the performance of this high end compiler; the Java version was running at about 2/3 the performance of the GCC version. Folks were gathered around the booth and someone noticed that the script they were using to run the Java version didn't have optimisation turned on. A few seconds with vi to add the "-server" switch and Java's performance jumped up to match the fancy C compiler. This got the pro-GCC crowd all excited, so a bunch of them started fiddling with its command line switches. They got a bit of improvement, but not much (the original selection had been pretty good).

The one place where Java does have a legitimate remaining performance issue is startup time. But these days it's down small enough to where anything that runs more than a few seconds has a hard time noticing it. Most startup time in modern Java apps goes to the app itself, not the VM.