Authors
Dachuan Yu
Zhong Shao
Valery Trifonov
Abstract
There is an ongoing debate
in the Java community on whether statically compiled implementations
can meet the Java specification on dynamic features such as
binary compatibility.
Static compilation is sometimes desirable because it provides
better code optimization, smaller memory footprint, more robustness, and
better intellectual property protection.
Unfortunately, none of the existing static Java compilers support
binary compatibility, because it incurs unacceptable performance overhead.
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution which handles
all of the binary-compatibility cases specified by the Java Language
Specification. Our experimental results using an implementation in the
GNU Java compiler
shows that the performance penalty is on average less than 2%.
Besides solving the problem for static compilers, it is also possible to
use this technique in JIT compilers to achieve an optimal
balance point between static and dynamic compilation.
Published
In
USENIX 2nd Java[TM] Virtual Machine Research and
Technology Symposium (JVM'02), San Francisco, California,
August 2002.
Winner of the Best Student Paper Award. ©2002 USENIX.