Re: Why is Coffi not used for bytecode generation?

[Patrick LAM <plam@sable.mcgill.ca>]

On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Stephen Cheng wrote:

> I have been going through the code, and I am wondering why Soot framework
> creates class files through jasmine, and not directly through Coffi or some
> other libraries like BCEL. It would appear that significant gain in
> performance can be produced by bypassing jasmine.
>
> I would appreciate if you could enlighten me to the philosophy behind the
> current strategy.

We haven't noticed that backend code generation is taking an inordinate
amount of time, although actual numbers aren't fresh in my mind.
Jasmin could only take an amount of time linear in the output size,
although the constant factor may or may not be large.

We used jasmin to avoid bytecode encoding issues, since we have a limited
amount of manpower and jasmin already works.  If you want to contribute
code which directly writes classfiles, we'd be open to incorporating it in
Soot.

pat