Efficient support for complex numbers in Java

One glaring weakness of Java for numerical programming is its lack of support for complex numbers. Simply creating a Complex number class leads to poor performance relative to Fortran. We show in this paper, however, that the combination of stich a Complex class and a compiler that understands its semantics does indeed lead to Fortran-like performance. This performance gain is achieved while leaving the Java language completely unchanged and maintaining full compatibility with existing Java Virtual Machines. We quantify the effectiveness of our approach through experiments with linear algebra, electromagnetics, and computational fluid-dynamics kernels.