Java Tip 141: Fast math with JNI

While developing a computer-generated hologram (CGH) program, I noticed that the math routines in Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.4x were several times slower than the corresponding routines in J2SE 1.3.1. Sun Microsystems has implemented a new math package, StrictMath, in J2SE 1.4 that guarantees identical math calculations across all platforms at the expense of execution speed. My CGH program ran seven times slower with the new J2SE 1.4x routines! I didn’t want to switch back to J2SE 1.3.1, however, because I wanted to use the new javax.imageio package to save my holograms to disk as .png files. I submitted some bug reports to Sun about this serious performance regression, but received no meaningful response.

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