> Yes. Java is getting closer and closer to native code performance. In some rare cases it can even beat C. But this is after billions of dollars have been thrown at trying to make Java fast.
Why is it a bad thing that someone was willing to pay money to make Java fast. Do you want to say that there haven't been billions of dollars in both money and man-hours thrown at trying to make C/C++ fast? There's no free performance.
> Why is it a bad thing that someone was willing to pay money to make Java fast.
I guess there's someone who wants to pay for that.
But I don't think it's money well spent. The Java bytecode is not designed for or suited to fast execution and it's a bad intermediate representation for computer programs to be compiled into native code. The Java byte code was designed to be easy to interpret and was designed at a time when a memory access was faster to execute than an ALU instruction (on cheap h/w where Java was originally intended to be run on). Those days have passed and we should move on to better intermediate representations for computer programs. Like LLVM IR.
Except that I don't want the Java part of it. I'd much rather just use Clang and C.
VMkit is a nice effort, though. I hope it will some day power fancy new languages that have dynamic features which are not well suited for AOT compilation.
Why is it a bad thing that someone was willing to pay money to make Java fast. Do you want to say that there haven't been billions of dollars in both money and man-hours thrown at trying to make C/C++ fast? There's no free performance.