Performance issues for Multi-language Java applications

Paul Murray, Todd Smith, Suresh Srinivas 
Silicon Graphics Inc 
Mountain View, CA 94040 
{pmurray, tsmith, ssuresh}@sgi.com 

Matthias Jacob 
Princeton University 
Princeton, NJ 
mjacob@cs.princeton.edu

Abstract

The Java programming language is increasingly being used to build
large-scale multi-language applications. This trend is due to several
factors including:
* Legacy libraries being wrapped with a Java interface (e.g., Java bindings
for OpenGL, Win32, VIA, MPI, etc., )
* Java applications with C/C++/Fortran cores written to address 
performance issues (e.g., Oil and Gas applications, visual simulations, etc.,).
* Servers embedding Java Virtual Machines that allow the development of 
server plugins in Java (e.g., Apache Web Server and Servlets, Informix 
Database and Java Datablades etc., )


There are a number of issues both in terms of correctness and
efficiency that need to be worked on to make this really viable.
In this paper we identify and discuss in depth the following issues:

* The strengths and weaknesses of several Native Interface implementations.
* The performance implications of interfacing with C/C++ from Java.
* Embedding of the Java VM in servers.

We present an implementation within our MIPS Just-In-Time compiler
that speeds up native interfacing by a factor of 3 to 4 over what is
implemented in the standard JavaSoft reference implementation. We also
present performance results for interfacing with native code for other
platforms such as Linux and NT to help understand the state of the
art in native interfacing.