Java producing native code

I rather like this.

Watch Java convert byte code to native code by downloading JDK 7 from here. Make sure you download the DEBUG file.

Then, run your code with something like:

/home/henryp/Tools/JDK_1_7_0_debug/jdk1.7.0/fastdebug/bin/java -XX:+PrintOptoAssembly -XX:CompileThreshold=5 -server -cp ./bin com.henryp.lang.ThreadWaitingMain

And watch glorious native code being generated.

The magic is in the XX:+PrintOptoAssembly flag. You also need -server but the -XX:CompileThreshold=5 is optional. It just says how many times the code needs to be executed before the JIT compiler kicks in.

You can see the atomic Java classes (eg, AtomicInteger) being reduced to little more than cmpxchg instructions (on x86 architectures at least) since they use compare-and-swap semantics of the underlying hardware to achieve their ends. See this excellent article for more information.