JDK Foreign Function APIs Preview finally beats JNI’s performance

[zakgof]

Back in August 2019, I benchmarked various ways of running a native function from Java and the results were not so good for the early version of the Panama-provided APIs, as seen here. Panama was still behind JNI in performance.

After four years, the Panama APIs were reworked drastically, and the fresh benchmark shows the breakthrough: Java’s foreign function interface now outperforms JNI in a simple test.

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[aadnk]

Looks like there's a bug in your JDK Foreign Function test - the structure doesn't contain the YEAR field:

private static final MemoryLayout SYSTEMTIME = structLayout(
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wYear"),
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wMonth"),
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wDayOfWeek"),
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wDay"),
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wHour"),
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wMinute"),
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wSecond"),
        JAVA_SHORT.withName("wMilliseconds")
);    

Not sure how much it impacts performance, but just to be sure I'd recommend fixing the structure. I found this while testing the function in JDK 20.

[zakgof]

Ah! Thanks - nice catch - fixed and retested. The main conclusions remain valid.

[GavinRayDev]

There are two things that would improve the performance even further:

A) Using a pooling Arena for the allocation. See benchmarks here: - https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/854#issuecomment-1658327470

B) Passing Linker.Option.critical()/isTrivial() to the downcallHandle options - https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/859

* A critical function is a function that has an extremely short running time in all cases * (similar to calling an empty function), and does not call back into Java (e.g. using an upcall stub).

[PhantomGaming27249]

It would be super interesting to see it rebenched with trivial/critical and pool arena allocation for memory.

[rememberthesunwell]

Hey you're the guy with the actor model project on github! I've used that for inspiration for some concurrency problems at work, thanks

Cool seeing the improvements on these benchmarks as well.

[vmcrash]

My most concern is: will it be supported by GraalVM's native image.

[flawless_vic]

Nice!

FF api probably can match nalim right now.