Foreword
Today, Java is used at the heart of the world’s largest and most critical computing systems. However, when I joined the Java team in 1997 the platform was young and just gaining popularity. People loved the simplicity of the language, the portability of bytecodes, and the safety of garbage collection (versus traditional malloc/free memory management of other systems). However, there was a trade-off for these great features. Java was slow, and this limited the kinds of environments where you could use it.
Over the next few years, we set about trying to fix this. We believed that just because Java applications were portable and safe they didn’t have to be slow. There were two major areas where we focused our attention. The first was to ...
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