For the longest time, I've taken it as an article of faith that the eclipse compiler (ecj) was significantly faster than the default Sun java compiler (javac). The last time I measured this properly was when I compared the Java5 compiler against the equivalent ecj release. After a recent conversation, I realised that I was still making the same assertion, despite over two years having elapsed.
So, time to measure again. And this time, the results surprised me. What used to be a whitewash for ecj has now changed to a slight edge being given for javac.
The test was done by repeating a build of the java components of the selenium codebase 20 times on an OS X machine running Lion and the latest released version of Java 7 from Oracle. The machine itself has 12GB of RAM and the development wasn't being done on an SSD. The results were:
javac: avg. 29.9s with a standard deviation of 0.80s
ecj: avg. 31.1s with a standard deviation of 0.82s
So, time to measure again. And this time, the results surprised me. What used to be a whitewash for ecj has now changed to a slight edge being given for javac.
The test was done by repeating a build of the java components of the selenium codebase 20 times on an OS X machine running Lion and the latest released version of Java 7 from Oracle. The machine itself has 12GB of RAM and the development wasn't being done on an SSD. The results were:
javac: avg. 29.9s with a standard deviation of 0.80s
ecj: avg. 31.1s with a standard deviation of 0.82s
