Good point. I had a professor who worked on the Java HotSpotVM and was a proponent of optimizing compiler. His attitude was RAM is cheap. But he also thought u

Good point. I had a professor who worked on the Java HotSpotVM and was a proponent of optimizing compiler. His attitude was RAM is cheap. But he also thought us LL1 Pascal style compilers too. In real world, native compiled applications written in C/C++/ObjectC/Rust rule the desktop world. In the enterprise/backend server we see a lot of Java/DotNet VM based memory hungry applications, Interpreter or modern VM based languages like PHP(HHVM/PHP7)/LuaJIT(nginx/openresty)/Javascript(Nodejs v8)/PyPy dominate the web and on smartphone one can decide to go native with iOS or the 8-core CPU and still a bit laggy Java lang VM based Android. Fortran and C and their compilers are still the benchmark to beat. As modern CPUs optimize and predict branches, some automatic optimization techniques in higher levels are counter productive.