Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Excelsior JET did that 25 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excelsior_JET

It's a shame that Sun/Oracle never partnered with them to bring native apps. This could have saved Java on the desktop.

Don't forget GCJ. It wasn't removed from GCC until about 2016, a nearly 20-year long run, though interest had waned many years prior.

I don't remember if GCJ supported loading and running code dynamically with a built-in JIT or interpreter. I think it was just pure AOT, which caused some compatibility headaches.

GCJ was great - I wrote a handset UI entirely in java for a startup in the early 2000's, basically android before android existed, using GCJ. I remember their native interface was somewhat more convenient to use than JNI.

I wish we had GCJ resurrected, now that the java libraries are GPL'd.

Just ask claude to port it to latest gcc :P, pls don't

Yeah! I used it around 2003 to integrate a Java PDF parsing library into our C++ app.

Its biggest downside was the use of Boehm GC that had some issues with large heaps.

I worked on this years ago. Gcj did support loading and interpreting bytecode alongside the AOT-compiled code. libffi's closures were originally implemented to support calling interpreted methods from AOT-compiled code, because a class's vtable could include a mix of AOT-compiled and interpreted methods. You could also compile jar files directly into .so files, which would get loaded and used at runtime if a classloader ever loaded the corresponding jar.

They were not the only ones, see PTC, Aicas, IBM, and a few others.

The big difference until GraalVM and OpenJ9 became available as open source, was that all those vendors made AOT compilation a commercial feature, and thus most devs never cared they existed.

In fact GraalVM was one of the main reasons Excelsior JET eventually closed doors.

IBM's J9 had AOT for a long time too. I wonder how JEP 544 compares.

IMHO the most interesting feature of OpenJ9 is the compile server. One node decides to optimize, sends over the traces, and the compile server sends optimized native code to all nodes. Or a new node joins and could be brought up to speed within a very short time.

Azul also has a similar feature, as added info.

The JRockit JVM had it already 20 years ago, and the company was even bought by Oracle shortly afterwards.

Some of the features have been added to JDK or GraalVM.

The only thing that could possibly save Java on the desktop would require Oracle not owning it.

Had it not been for Oracle, Java would have died in version 6.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com