Java as Fast as C++?
Quoting Steve Yegge’s talk at Stanford on 7 May 2008:
[I]t’s interesting because C++ is obviously faster for, you know, the short-running [programs], but Java cheated very recently. With multicore [processors]! This is actually becoming a huge thorn in the side of all the C++ programmers, including my colleagues at Google, who’ve written vast amounts of C++ code that doesn’t take advantage of multicore. And so the extent to which the cores, you know, the processors become parallel, C++ is gonna fall behind …
Java programs are getting amazing throughput because they can parallelize and they can take advantage of it. They cheated! Right? But threads aside, the JVM has gotten really really fast, and at Google it’s now widely admitted on the Java side that Java’s just as fast as C++. [(laughter)]
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