Sun's Java Developer Network interviewed Brian Goetz, author of Java Concurrency in Practice, and currently a Sun technology evangelist. The interview, Writing Better Code: A Conversation With Sun Microsystems Technology Evangelist Brian Goetz, focused on Java performance, one of Goetz's specialties.

In the interview, Goetz gave this advice on how to write faster-performing Java code:

Often, the way to write fast code in Java applications is to write dumb code—code that is straightforward, clean, and follows the most obvious object-oriented principles.

This has to do with the nature of dynamic compilers, which are big pattern-matching engines. Because compilers are written by humans who have schedules and time budgets, the compiler developers focus their efforts on the most common code patterns, because that's where they get the most leverage. So if you write code using straightforward object-oriented principles, you'll get better compiler optimization than if you write gnarly, hacked-up, bit-banging code that looks really clever but that the compiler can't optimize effectively.

So clean, dumb code often runs faster than really clever code, contrary to what developing in C might have taught us. In C, clever source code turns into the expected idiom at the machine-code level, but it doesn't work that way in Java applications...

If I could wave a magic wand and send out one message about Java programming, it would be this: Trust the JVM. It's smarter than you think. Stop trying to outwit or outsmart it. Tell it what you want, and it will do its damnedest to make your application run as fast as it can.

Does your experience confirm Goetz's admonition that straightforward Java code runs faster than code specially tweaked with performance in mind?