Snooping on the optimisers

[Roedy Green]

If you wanted to have a look at the machine code actually generated by
either a native or Hotspot, how would you go about it?

How could you trigger a dump of RAM. How could you get it disassembled
to assembler?

I used to do this all the time with 16 bit code with Periscope and the
plunger and a similar device for the Apple][. I have never done it
with 32-bit code.

 

[Adam P. Jenkins]

I don't know about Hotspot, but if you compile with gcj, the GNU Java native
compiler, then you can just run it with the -S option to make it output
assembler code to a text file instead of object code.

I.e.

gcj -S myclass.java

This creates myclass.i, which contains the assembler output. Every other
native compiler I've tried, for any language, had similar options.