Why is there no server software making use of the JNI/FFI?
When it comes to server software, 99% is based on the vanilla minecraft server. There are efforts to rewrite it completely (feather_rs, valence, ...), but not a single one achieved feature parity with the vanilla version. In Java, there is something called the JNI which allows the JVM to call natively compiled code (written in some other programming language e.g. C, C++, Rust, Zig, ...) and therefore could offer huge performance advantages over the existing java code. Isn't that an opportunity to rewrite very specific, computing intense functions with the use of JNI/FFI and achieve a much more performant server software?
I'm not at all familiar with JNI or FFI and I'm sure there is a simple answer to this (No speed advantage? Cross-Platform compability? Too complex?).
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Requested by gold.ly#0
What you're saying is sadly wrong
JNI has extreme overhead
It will cause major slowdowns, it won't make anything faster
Not only is JNI too complex, it will also cause compatability issues yes
You'd have to recompile the native binaries for every OS and architecture
Thanks for your answer. It's really hard to imagine that JNI is even slower than some of the heavy functions in vanilla etc and here (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7699020/what-makes-jni-calls-slow) they claim the call isn't that slow (or is it something else than the call itself?).
Stack Overflow
What makes JNI calls slow?
I know that 'crossing boundaries' when making a JNI call in Java is slow.
However I want to know what is it that makes it slow?
What does the underlying jvm implementation do when making a JNI cal...
They are slow
Even if they aren't “that” slow, it'd still be slower than the current implementation
Thanks anyways 🙂
security, bypassing most of the JVMs current optimisations, only useful for certain operations, needs to be compiled per platform, debugging JNI stuff isn’t fun
security is one that people don’t tend to realise noting JNI bypasses the JVM’s security model completely
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Requested by gold.ly#0