[SoftwareMaven]

You are wrong. A JITted environment can take advantage of knowing about the current run of the system. As a result, it can do things like unroll loops and inline function calls.

Yes, you could do the same thing in C code, but the resulting executable would be unreasonably large because you would have to unroll every loop and inline every function.

Pypy has show itself faster than C in some cases as well[1].

1. http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/08/pypy-is-faster-than-c-a...

[tptacek]

That PyPy example has nothing to do with C and everything to do with a particular implementation of libc.

[tedunangst]

Maybe some day they will add profile guided optimization to C compilers.

[thedigitalengel]

They're not the same. VMs can assume invariants (which may not always hold) and compile specialized methods which depend on those assumptions and then fall back to a non-optimized version during the execution of a method. To do something like that (OSR) in C, you'll have to have a very sophisticated runtime.

[taf2]

you're kidding right? and at least referring to gcc's -fprofile-generate -fprofile-use right?

[tptacek]

Profile-guided optimization is decades old. It was, for example, one of the things people loved about the (Ultrix?) DEC Alpha compiler was profile-driven optimization.

[wglb]

First VMS.

That was one of the outstanding compilers ever written.

[pbiggar]

There is a major difference between performing profile-generated optimizations at compile-time based on sample data, and performing it at run-time based on real data. It is one pretty good way in which JITs could beat programs implemented directly in C.

[gillianseed]

Not really since the 'sample' data is 'real' data which has been gathered during run-time.

[pbiggar]

That is the most optimistic statement about profile-directed optimization that I have ever read.