[ootachi]

No, I'm talking about the verifier [1]. In particular: "There are no operand stack overflows or underflows." That requires abstract interpretation.

And every performant Java interpreter is required to convert the stack machine to vregs in order to perform register allocation. That requires abstract interpretation too.

[1]: http://java.sun.com/docs/white/langenv/Security.doc3.html

[jasonmc]

Sure, but I'd be willing to bet that performance impact of the the verifier is insignificant for all but the most trivial of programs.