On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 13:10 -0500, Archie Cobbs wrote: > Those are good points.. I'm not saying JIT is bad, I'm just saying > WAT has a place and can sometimes do things that JITs cannot because > of time constraints.
Yes - in the real world, JITs don't always necessarily win. Here's an example. Wikipedia is currently using a gcj-built version of Lucene to power their search feature. Here's some text describing a benchmark that help them make this decision: ----- cut here ------------------------------------------------ Crude, simple benchmark; does single-word fulltext search for “pope” 100 times sequentially. This is a fairly popular word, and returns 6890 results from the test database used (English Wikipedia, 2005-03-09 dump). Time returned is the average time spent for a request on the client, over the second set of 100 runs. GCJ 4.0 -O2: 588.3437 ms (fastest) Sun Java 1.5 -server: 636.9209 ms Sun Java 1.5: 695.5374 ms GCJ 4.0: 707.2302 ms Mono 1.1.6: 894.4488 ms (slowest) Each version of the daemon read from the same index set, which I had generated with the Mono-based version. (dotlucene 1.4 is index- compatible with the Java Lucene 1.4.) ----- cut here ------------------------------------------------ I'm fairly certain we can do much better with additional compiler options (-march=pentium4 and the like). In any case, this is a showcase app for Apache + FSF technology working together in an important real-world application. AG