afair, the most important optimization there is that something can be allocated on the stack instead of the heap, which is quite an optimization. EDIT: it does

afair, the most important optimization there is that something can be allocated on the stack instead of the heap, which is quite an optimization. EDIT: it does not actually have anything to do what you can stick in registers--at least nothing comes to my mind w/o thinking too hard about it... relevant papers directly from the hotspot-jvm are: -kotzmann, moessenboeck, "escape analysis in the context of dynamic compilation and deoptimization" http://www.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p111-kotzmann.pdf http://www.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p111-kotzmann... -kotzmann, moessenboeck: "run-time support for optimizations based on escape analysis" http://ftp.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Papers/Ko07/Ko07.pdf http://ftp.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Papers/Ko07/Ko07.pdf