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Message:

was this a real application? or a carefully-chosen demo?

Posted by Jonathan Brumley on 06 Jul 1998, 3:16 PM

> > > Has anybody given this thing a try? There's been quite a buzz lately,
> > > like to hear from someone who has worked with an early beta.
> > >
> > The only people outside Sun who I've heard have seen Hotspot
> > are Java licensees. Those folks are likely under NDA and wouldn't
> > be able to tell us anything about what they saw. I certainly
> > haven't seen it in action, just heard about it in theory.

> > bv

> Yes, several thousand people saw a very impressive demo of HotSpot at JavaOne. A Java application using HotSpot performed 150% faster than an identitical application in C++. Both applications created and destroyed 10 million objects. The Java application finished in 2.2 seconds, while the C++ application took 5.5 seconds. Since Java is a true OO language, this is a telling and important demo.

> Regards, Mike

If this was just a carefully-chosen demo, I'm not impressed at all. It's easy to tune an algorithm to have great performance for one demo. The real test is: will real Java applications perform faster? i.e. Is Javac faster? Is HotJava faster? Is my Java app faster? Will these apps run faster on my PC?

Real benchmark applications run on real applications, and this is the only true measure of performance. Anything else is just marketing hype.