A Java compiler is a compiler for the Java programming language. The most common form of output from a Java compiler are Java class files containing platform-neutral Java bytecode. There exist also compilers emitting optimized native machine code for a particular hardware/Operating system combination.

Most Java-to-bytecode compilers, Jikes being a well known exception, do virtually no optimization, leaving this until runtime to be done by the JRE^{citation needed}.

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) loads the class files and either interprets the bytecode or just-in-time compiles it to machine code and then possibly optimizes it using dynamic compilation.

The very first Java compiler developed by Sun Microsystems was written in C using some libraries from C++.^{citation needed}

Major Java compilers

As of 2006, the following are major Java compilers:

• javac, included in JDK from Sun Microsystems, open-sourced since 13 November 2006.
• GCJ, a part of gcc which compiles C, Fortran, Pascal and other programming languages besides Java. It can also generate native code using the back-end of gcc.
• ECJ, the Eclipse Compiler for Java, is an open source incremental compiler used by the Eclipse JDT.
• Jikes, an open source compiler from IBM, which is written in C++ and uses a variant of static single assignment form for optimization. As of early 2007 the project is no longer being actively developed ^[1].
• Excelsior JET (commercial) also compiles Java to Windows and Linux binary executables and packages them for deployment.

References

External links

• Sun's OpenJDK javac page
• Jikes homepage
• JSR 199 Java Compiler API Java Specification Request for invoking the Java compiler from a Java program

This computer language-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.