Are java.lang classes better served by the JVM?

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Vitaly Davidovich <vitalyd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) value/struct types (i.e. avoid heap and be able to pack data closer
> together).  I don't how much we can rely on EA.
> 2) more auto-vectorization
>
> I think 2 is being worked on by Vladimir but unclear if there are any
> concrete plans for 1.  I know John Rose has written about it, but don't know
> if anything's actually planned.

Yeah, other than the occasional cries of "tail calls" I think the
performance of boxed numerics (or boxed anything that doesn't need to
be boxed) is by far the #1 pain point for dynlang implementers on JVM
right now.

I'm hopeful that the indy opto work happening for JDK8 will be able to
EA across dyncall boundaries, but you're rightly skeptical about the
current EA saving us much overhead. Because everything needs to inline
to EA, I don't expect to see a lot of improvement for numerics.
However, I *would* expect to see improvements in cases where we create
truly transient data structures e.g. for "out" params, since they
should be easier to inline and more localized.

- Charlie