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Azul Platform Prime’s Falcon JIT Compiler

LLVM — The Technology Behind Falcon

The Falcon JIT compiler is based on technology from LLVM, the popular compiler infrastructure project with active involvement from leading universities and dozens of corporate contributors including Adobe, Apple, Google, NVIDIA, and Intel.

Today LLVM is used in a variety of programming languages and frameworks outside Java and the JVM, including newer platforms like Swift and Rust as well as many others including C/C++, Objective-C, Swift, Clang, OpenCL, CUDA and many more.

LLVM is considered the state-of-the-art in compiler technology, and the LLVM community is continually incorporating new optimization techniques and support for new processor instruction sets and hardware platforms.

Falcon – Business Benefits

The performance advantages for Java workloads when running with Azul Platform Prime’s new Falcon JIT compiler have significant business benefits:

  • Lower development costs: fewer engineering hours required to achieve desired performance, consistency and scale
  • Lower operating costs: reduced memory footprint requirements, improved load carrying capacities on similarly sized instances in Cloud/AWS deployments
  • Better customer experience: reliably achieve customer expectations even under unpredictable load, improved customer satisfaction
  • Better application service level metrics: reduced latency, reduced timeouts, better consistency

Frequently asked questions about Falcon

When is Azul Platform Prime shipping with Falcon?

Falcon has been shipping with Azul Platform Prime for several years.  Starting version 17.03, Falcon became the default JIT compiler for Azul Platform Prime, replacing the legacy C2 compiler.

Is Falcon faster than C2?

Yes.

Is C2 still supported by Azul Platform Prime?

Yes, C2 can be used by specifying a flag at JVM startup.

Do I need to recompile my existing application to use Falcon?

No.

Which versions of Java are supported by Falcon?

Falcon works with applications built using any JDK version since Java SE 7/OpenJDK 7.

Looking for more information about Falcon?

Read Azul CTO Gil Tene’s blog post

Also, see Simon Ritter’s blog post

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