[H-GEN] Which is better?

[Adrian Sutton]

> So now I don't profile.  The new languages I use - Java / C#, don't 
> even
> come with a profiler.  Odd, isn't it?  20 years ago the C compiler I
> used came with "cc -p".  The newer languages don't.  This is sad.  I
> obviously don't understand the languages I am using now near as well as
> I understood C+Unix, and I can't profile either.

Russell,
You're obviously a very experienced and talented C programmer.  Your 
last few emails however are giving me a distinct impression that you 
just haven't taken enough time to learn Java properly, nor are you 
following developments in the Java world very closely.  If you're not 
profiling you're not doing your job properly, simple as that.  You 
can't predict how things in the Java world will work.

Take some time to read through "man java" and then move on to 
http://java.sun.com  You will be very enlightened.  In particular the 
two options you should investigate are "-Xprof" and "-Xmx", they will 
explain a lot.  For your doubts about how much optimization the JIT 
does in Java, I suggest you investigate the "-Xint" option.  For your 
doubts about how much overhead garbage collection incurs, I suggest you 
look into the "-Xnoclassgc" option.  Mostly though I suggest you read 
the technical articles at http://java.sun.com including the Java 
Virtual Machine specification.  I would also suggest browsing through 
James Gosling's blog at http://today.java.net/jag/ and keeping half an 
eye on http://java.net    Planet Sun (http://planetsun.org) also has a 
bunch of people who work on the Java backend there as does Planet 
Apache (http://www.planetapache.org/).  The blogs are obviously 
informal, can be incorrect and are often irrelevant - but they are 
worth skimming over for the occasional piece of brilliance.   
http://www.onjava.com/  is also worth keeping an eye on.

As I said, I'm sure you're a very talented developer and I don't mean 
to belittle you but this thread has identified a range of holes in your 
knowledge and understanding of the Java platform.  Filling in those 
holes will make you a much better Java programmer, if not a better 
programmer overall.  I also suggest you take another look at modern 
compilers, they've changed a lot since the 8mhz days of computers and 
are particularly powerful with languages like Java that can be set up 
to provide a rich amount of information to profilers.  Personally, I 
use Borland OptimizeIt with great results.  It shows not only the list 
of functions that take the most time but allow you to drill down in 
your application from each entry point to all the methods that are 
called, following the percentages of time taken at each point.  It's 
memory profiler is also excellent for detecting memory leaks in Java 
code which otherwise would go unnoticed.  The positive comments we have 
received from our customers about the improved speed since we started 
using OptimizeIt are well worth the money we paid for it - particularly 
since before we seriously profiled the application we believed it just 
couldn't be made to go faster.

Regards,

Adrian Sutton.

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