Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

Another shot fired in the "Java vs. C++" war is the The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark. Right away, you can tell that this is an unbiased benchmark (because it says so right in the title!). Anyway, this page compares the performance of C++ vs. Java for a number of benchmarks (taken from the now retired Great Computer Language Shootout). Java does well when compared to C++ in these tests.

I've been around the block enough times to be a bit leary of any performance claims (remember Apple's "fastest PC), nevertheless, there's enough info (including code) on the page to allow anyone to reproduce the numbers.

At the bottom of the benchmark page is a set of links to a few other sets of Java vs. C or C++ comparisions including a reference to FreeTTS - A Performance Case Study, a paper written by our speech team here in Sun Labs. This paper describes the performance issues we encountered when developing FreeTTS. I think it is a pretty good representation of the issues involved in developing a high-performance Java application along with a comparision between a Java and a native-C version of the same application. This paper describes how we ported a native-C synthesizer (Flite) to Java (FreeTTS) and how were able to get better performance from our engine.