Improving Performance of JNA by Using LLVM JIT Compiler

Abstract

Java Native Access (JNA) has been proposed to alleviate the burden of programming in Java Native Interface (JNI). JNA allows programmer to call native functions without writing any JNI codes. However, JNA suffers from some performance degradation. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we modify the JNA source code and integrate the LLVM JIT compiler into JNA to improve the performance. Our experiment achieves about 8% to 16% performance improvement for calling a native function with different types and numbers of arguments. Furthermore, our design is a non-traditional way of using the runtime compiler, and the challenges we encountered may help other researchers to face the similar situations.