[lokedhs]

My personal open source evening hacking project for the last year or two has been a Kotlin multiplatform project. It's language interpreter that runs on the JVM, Native and Javascript.

Since the project is an interpreter, it's easy to do performance testing between the different platforms. I just write some program in my language, and run it on each implementation.

The results are interesting. The JVM target is consistently 20 times faster than native. Now some of this is because memory allocations are so fast in the JVM, so if your programs does less memory allocations the difference won't be that great. However, if you compile Kotlin to native code, one has to accept that it's much slower.

Another problem with native compilation is that it's quite slow. I wouldn't want to do all my development using native, but rather develop using the JVM and then compile to native for the use cases that need it.

The only time I think that native would make sense is if you absolutely cannot run the JVM for some reason. One such reason would be for embedded (which would have to be ARM, since that's the only embedded architecture that's supported).