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Date:      Sat, 9 Mar 2002 16:23:06 -0800
From:      Bill Huey <billh@gnuppy.monkey.org>
To:        Mcclain Looney <mcclain@looneys.net>
Cc:        java@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Performance of Java/FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <20020310002306.GA1961@gnuppy.monkey.org>
In-Reply-To: <20020309164047.3F53A226B0@mail.looneys.net>
References:  <20020309171247.D26683-100000@puget.esil.univ-mrs.fr> <20020309164047.3F53A226B0@mail.looneys.net>

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On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 10:41:22AM -0600, Mcclain Looney wrote:
> it's a fairly well established fact that java on freeBSD is sub-par, and has 
> been since the beginning.
> 
> http://www.volano.com/report/index.html
> 
> for reasons that escape me, freebsd seems to be rather apathetic about the 
> advancement of java on its platform, which is unfortunate.  my theory is that 
>  java's closed nature isn't appealing  to potential cleanroom vm developers.
> 
> hopefully some day that will change, but as far as I can tell, there are no 
> java champions high up the ladder of freebsd power (so to speak).  please 
> correct me if i'm wrong.

First of all it's basically driven by a small set of highly technical volunteers
that spend time on it, like me (Greg, etc...), to get something working for the
community as a whole. It's bottom-up driven like many open source projects filling
primarily with engineers without a management layer of sorts. It's not apathy as
much as limited by the developer resources we currently have.

Current efforts are very grassrootsy in operational style, which can only scale
effectively to about 2-4 people in volunteer group such as this.

"Performance"

We basically need HotSpot. It's something I'm actively working on and it's quite
a difficult task since I'm deal with both the nitty gritty pthreads plumbing and
advanced JIT internals of a bleeding edge compiler (rolling forward for exception
handling, safepoints, etc...). It's just not trivial stuff by any means, but I'm
definitely converging to a point of clarity for various parts of that code tree
and hopefully something useable will come soon.

Stuff like OpenJIT and ShuJIT should help things quite a bit for now but...


It's definitely a public observation that our project pretty sketchy for many
technical and developer resource related reasons at this time. That's just the
way it is for now, but it's definitely going to change as folks keep working on
it. Certainly a working HotSpot is going to dramatically help things.


I was kind of miffed when I first read your post, but I trimmed down the text to
about 1/3rd of it's original size and removed all pissiness. ;)

That's all for now. ;)

bill


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