>I've also seen a Modicon PLC based on the StrongARM CPU running natively compiled Java. There are a number of native compilers for Java bytecode that have been shipping for years, one of them from a company owned by Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft. When Java is natively compiled, C++/C lose their performance edge. Incidentally, C++/C are stack oriented languages as well.

I guess the point of the JIT (just-in-time) compilers is to give you advantage of native compiled code without losing platform independence. As the chips get faster and the compiler technology improves, the delay for JIT will go down.

The point of Sun's Hot Spot compiler is to identify the few of areas of the Java program that are being executed the most and optimize those spots. On the fly, I suppose.

Peter