I just read this snippet from “Programming Languages” by Robert W. Sebesta.
“Java’s portability, at least in intermediate form, has often been attributed to the design of the languages, but it is not. Any language could be translated to an intermediate form and “run” on any platform that had a virtual machine for that intermediate form. The price of this kind of portability is the cost of interpretation, which traditionally has been about an order of magnitude more than execution of machine code. The initial version of the Java interpreter, called the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), indeed was at least ten times slower than equivalent C programs. However, many Java programs are now translated to machine code before being executed, using the Just In Time (JIT) compilers. This makes the efficiency of Java programs competitive with that of programs in compiled languages such as C++”
I’m interested to see how JIT works. Do components of Apache Tomcat, Jboss, Jetty get precompiled to native code by JIT? If not, then couldn’t we save enormous amounts of $$ by doing that? It would reduce the cost of running those servers (cycles = energy = $$) and increase the performance of the applications.
I need to read into this more. (this book is old, my course book from Wayne State University lol, 2004)
