Its very possible they would have gotten significant (though possibly not equivalent) reduction if they reprogrammed it directly in Java. An old codebase often

Its very possible they would have gotten significant (though possibly not equivalent) reduction if they reprogrammed it directly in Java. An old codebase often has a lot of useless cruft and over-abstractions and so on, and you do better each time you code something. The experimental control is not the old code base, it is translating the same code base back to itself with similar engineering effort. No wonder few people actually try to gather that sort of data.