[Sablevm-user] Re: SableVM performance [Was: Re: hello]

[Dalibor T. <ro...@ka...>]

Grzegorz B. Prokopski <gadek <at> debian.org> writes:

> They show, that that Kaffe's interpreter is 3.5 to 7 times slower than
> SableVM. At the same time SableVM's performance was very near Sun's JDK
> interpteter, which (as informed sources say) is partially written in
> assembly (SableVM is pure C).

That's the 'normal', naive intepreter in kaffe, as far as I can tell from the
paper. There is a threaded-interpreter patch for kaffe here: 
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/java/kaffe-threaded/ but it hasn't been merged
in into the kaffe sources yet, and the internal APIs have changed since the
version the patch is against, so it probably won't apply cleanly. Jim Huang is
looking into merging it in into kaffe's CVS, but it's not there yet.

The web site mentions an up to 3 fold increase in performance over the naive
interpreter using a possibly patent encumbered technique. I've got no idea
whether the mentioned patent really holds water or not, I assume Etienne might
know more about it.

In any case, since Etienne's benchmarks show up to 7 times better results for
SableVM's interpreter, chances are that even with the threaded interpreter patch
SableVM's implementation would outperform Kaffe's interpreter.

cheers,
dalibor topic