16 Feb 2006
A look at GCJ 4.1
LWN published A look at GCJ 4.1 (and beyond). It seems there will be a GCC 4.1 RC1 release soon so everybody can try it out. (update: no rc1 yet, hopefully over the weekend.)
Although the article didn’t discuss any speed improvements (it is mainly about the progress of the standard core library) there are some comments to the article pointing out different benchmarks. There were also some interesting threads about performance on the gcj mailing list. Some reports claim native-complied GCJ modules are almost always about 30-40% faster than other implementations (at least on real world code). Others have micro-benchmarks that show that there are cases where gcj isn’t as fast at all. But in the end you have to be careful about what you benchmark, or GCJ will just optimize away all non-used code :)