Speaker: Mark Stoodley

The Java ecosystem has perhaps the most rich variety of native code compilation technologies of any language on the planet. We have Just In Time (JIT) compilers aggressively profiling and speculating on the state of a running program. There are Ahead of Time (AOT) compilers that generate code before the program runs. We have JIT compilers that cache their code so it won’t need to be recompiled in every run and, soon, compilation services that can perform JIT compilations outside of the JVM process. Are these compiler technologies all equally good at running Java applications? Which should you choose? In this talk, I’ll examine some of the strengths and weaknesses of all these different approaches if you were to apply them in isolation, and discuss how production JVMs are assembling a combination of these tools that work together to provide excellent performance across the huge spectrum of applications written in Java and JVM based languages.

A lot of the techniques and approaches that we use for developing and improving software performance are tried and tested rather than innovative - but where does that leave startups who leverage the VM? What does the future hold?