In more depth : the sun JDK probably does a lot better job of JIT compilation, it's the difference between running interpreted bytecode and compiled native code

In more depth : the sun JDK probably does a lot better job of JIT compilation, it's the difference between running interpreted bytecode and compiled native code. On the Hadoop project, checksumming was a major CPU constraint, because you have to assume every file everywhere is possibly on faulty hardware, and checksum everything. They found that it was actually faster to implement CRC32 in pure Java and let the JIT compilation do it's magic than it was to make native calls to zlibc. But that may not apply to floating point if the Java implementation is bad enough.