Kawaguchi focuses on two main areas. The first is loop unrolling, a technique where the instructions called in each iteration of the loop are replicated to form a single sequence. This saves time by reducing the number of overhead instructions that the computer has to execute in a loop. JIT combines this with a warm up and cool down and Kawaguchi's commentary highlights the fact that the compiler has removed a redundant array index check from the fast part of the loop. Moreover the resulting assembly code demonstrates how much processor specific optimization is going on. Kawaguchi notes, for instance, that the following code:
private static byte[] foo() {
byte[] buf = new byte[256];
for( int i=0; i<buf.length; i++ )
buf[i] = 0;
return buf;
}
results in assembly using the R8-R15 general purpose registers specific to the AMD64 chip.
The second area Kawaguchi's blog examines is the optimizations that have been made around locks. Whilst uncontended lock acquisition has been steadily improving in Java for some time, contended acquisition has remained problematic. Work in this area is still on-going but Kawaguchi's work does highlight several areas that have improved.
The article shows a number of other features of the Hotspot compiler, including how aggressive the inlining is - James Gosling notes in a corresponding blog post that "even storage allocation & initialization gets inlined". Part of the reason this level of aggression is possible is that the JVM is able to make potentially unsafe optimizations where necessary. Charles Nutter provides a good explanation of this in a post on attending the Lang .NET conference from earlier in the year. His post also highlights the relevance of this work to JRuby, and by implication any language which targets the JVM.
"The JVM has over time had varying capabilities to dynamically optimize and reoptimize code...and perhaps most importantly, to dynamically *deoptimize* code when necessary. Deoptimization is very exciting when dealing with performance concerns, since it means you can make much more aggressive optimizations--potentially unsafe optimizations in the uncertain future of an entire application--knowing you'll be able to fall back on a tried and true safe path later on. So you can do things like inlining entire call paths once you've seen the same path a few times. You can do things like omitting synchronization guards until it becomes obvious they're needed. And you can change the set of optimizations applied after the fact...in essence, you can safely be "wrong" and learn from your mistakes at runtime. This is the key reason why Java now surpasses C and C++ in specific handcrafted benchmarks and why it should eventually be able to exceed C and C++ in almost all benchmarks. And it's a key reason why we're able to get acceptable performance out of JRuby having done far less work than Microsoft has done on IronPython and the DLR."
It has always been theoretically possible that an interpreted language like Java would ultimately surpass the performance of a complied language, since it is able to make optimizations at run-time based on the available hardware, and the increasing use of processor specific optimization in Java is a particularly exciting development in this regard. For the developer targeting the Java platform a significant plus point is that with each new release of the Java compiler code performance improves without any changes needing to be made to the application's source.