An Experimental Evaluation of JAVA JIT Technology

Interpreted languages are widely used due to ease to use, portability, and safety. On the other hand, interpretation imposes a significance overhead. Just­in­ Time (JIT) compilation is a popular approach to improving the runtime performance of languages such as Java. We compare the performance of a JIT compiler with a traditional compiler and with an emulator. We show that the compilation overhead from using JIT is negligible, and that the JIT compiler achieves better overall performance, suggesting the case for aggresive compilation in JIT compilers.