Comment by linuxhansl
3 days ago
Didn't Java 1.3 (Sun's JDK) introduce the JIT? I remember talking to colleagues about what a joke Java performance was (we were working in C++ then). And then with Java 1.3 that started to change.
(Today, even though I still C++, C, along with Java, I'll challenge anyone who claims that Java is slower then C++.)
Maybe not slower once it has warmed up, though for memory-bandwidth bound use cases I would still say the lack of mutable records has you fighting the language to get reasonable cache locality (and everybody will hate your code for not being good Java). The fact that everything is a pointer kills the CPU execution pipeline and cache.
But even for I/O bound applications it still feels slow because excessive memory usage means more swap thrashing (slowing down your entire OS), and startup time suffers greatly from having to fire up VM + loading classes and waiting for the JIT to warm up.
I can start a C/C++/Rust based web server in under a second. The corresponding server in Java takes 10 seconds, or minutes once I have added more features.
The first official JIT became available in JDK 1.1, in 1997. The Symantec JIT was available as an add-on sometime in mid 1996, just a few months after JDK 1.0 was released. Even better performance was possible with GCJ, available in 1998.
The release of HotSpot was in 1999, and became default with JDK 1.3 in 2000. It took JIT compilation to the next level, making tools like GCJ mostly obsolete.