Tag: jit

Interesting Links – 21 October 2016

  • Everything is fine with JavaScript – hold on, I know, this is a Java blog! But it’s okay. Trust me. This post says a lot about JavaScript – but a lot of it is also very transferable to the Java ecosystem. One headline stands out: “If someone is holier-than-thou about technology choices, they’re wrong and you should ignore them.” (Notice how carefully I’m avoiding bringing up, say, MySQL or JSF here.)
  • From r/java: Externalizor says that it is a library for “efficient (fast and small) Java serialization using Externalizable interface.” No analysis provided of the potential security risks, and there’s no description of the format – but one nice thing about Externalizable is that the library allows users to leverage the standard Java serialization. (No comment on whether that is an actual good thing or not.)
  • User yawkat made a reference to JITWatch, a tool for understanding the behavior of the Java HotSpot Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler during the execution of your program. It’s not exactly trivial to use (you may have to use a debugging version of the JVM – see the instructions) but the information can be really cool.

Interesting Links – 17 Oct 2016

  • JEP 295: Ahead-of-Time Compilation offers deployers a chance to compile the base Java modules to native code. This can save time on some optimizations, but it’s understandably limited (and should be).
  • The Halstead Metrics (also known as “Halsted metrics”) discusses code complexity in Java. Worth considering; this particular explanation comes courtesy of JHawk, a commercial code metrics tool, not to be confused with “j-hawk“, an open source testing tool.
  • Experimenting with “mutation testing” and Kotlin is a neat post describing PIT, a testing tool that changes your source code and runs your tests – if your tests don’t fail, your tests are probably bad (or your code’s awful.)