Sometimes javac Does Optimize

Sometimes, javac apparently decides not to be utterly stupid. Sometimes it optimizes. Here’s the special case: When a program locks this, which is always present in local variable 0 in non-static methods, it does not allocate an additional local variable. I expected the following:


GeSHi Error: GeSHi could not find the language jvm (using path /home/dh_8dhf9b/concurrentaffair.org/wp-content/plugins/codecolorer/lib/geshi/) (code 2)

But in this case, javac is smart enough to realize that aload_0 already contains this, so it generates


GeSHi Error: GeSHi could not find the language jvm (using path /home/dh_8dhf9b/concurrentaffair.org/wp-content/plugins/codecolorer/lib/geshi/) (code 2)

But, of course, if the user declares a local variable, like in the following example, javac does not recognize this. This Java code

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final Object temp = someField;
synchronized(temp) {
    ...
}

mercilessly generates this bytecode:


GeSHi Error: GeSHi could not find the language jvm (using path /home/dh_8dhf9b/concurrentaffair.org/wp-content/plugins/codecolorer/lib/geshi/) (code 2)

Now I have to put more conditionals into my code. Yuck. I hope there aren’t more of these rare optimizations hidden somewhere. All of this gives me a bad feeling about relying on my perception of what javac generates. It would be much more prudent to just rely on the VM specifications, as I did before.

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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