Sun or IBM's jdk

arashb · n00b Joined: 14 Apr 2003 Posts: 31 Location: Iran

In a thread I learned that Sun's jdk-1.4.1 is compiled by gcc2.95 any not really compatible wth gcc3.2. Now I want to know what is the situation of IBM's jdk, I have read somewhere that it's performance is much better? Shall I use it

PowerFactor · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2003 4:50 am Post subject:

I personally use the IBM jdk because I heard it was faster but I can't tell much difference. You might have trouble using the plugin from either of them with mozilla if you compile mozilla with gcc3.x. Otherwise either will work fine. There is not an ebuild for ibm's 1.4 jdk yet though, just 1.3. There is a sun-j2sdk ebuild that builds the sun one from source but I haven't tried it.

cram · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2003 6:11 am Post subject:

In my opinion the performance of the JRE from Sun and IBM are similar, but if you plan on actually developing Java apps with the jdk, then I strongly recommend IBM's jdk. Sun's jdk produces fairly useless compiler error message if any.
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aaarggghhhh.
Good point Chewie.

bdufour · Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2003 3:19 pm Post subject:

IBM's JDK is indeed much faster than Sun's in many situations, at least if you compare both JDK in their 1.3.1 version. I have measured the performance of many benchmark programs using both VMs, and IBM's was almost always faster. IBM puts a lot of efforts into making their version of the JDK very efficient.

There are some implementation differences between them, so in my case certain program optimisations would not work in IBM's jdk, but it did not need them anyway to beat Sun's implementation (even with as many optimisations as I could think of).

BTW, you can install IBM's jdk v1.4 is in portage at the moment. You go to /usr/portage/dev-java/ibm-jdk and emerge ibm-jdk-1.4.0-r2.ebuild directly.