Comparison To Other Languages
Objectively comparing the performance of a Java program and another equivalent one written in another programming language such as C++ requires a carefully and thoughtfully constructed benchmark which compares programs expressing algorithms written in as identical a manner as technically possible. The target platform of Java's bytecode compiler is the Java platform, and the bytecode is either interpreted or compiled into machine code by the JVM. Other compilers almost always target a specific hardware and software platform, producing machine code that will stay virtually unchanged during its execution. Very different and hard-to-compare scenarios arise from these two different approaches: static vs. dynamic compilations and recompilations, the availability of precise information about the runtime environment and others.
Java is often Just-in-time compiled at runtime by the Java Virtual Machine, but may also be compiled ahead-of-time, just like C++. When Just-in-time compiled, its performance is generally:
- slower than compiled languages such as C or C++,
- similar to other Just-in-time compiled languages such as C#,
- much faster than languages without an effective native-code compiler (JIT or AOT), such as Perl, Ruby, PHP and Python.
Read more about this topic: Java Performance
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