Igniters, I was a bit concerned about portable marshalling performance in .Net and performed a very quick and dirty evaluation of the following optimizations:
1) For non-"marshal-aware" objects metadata is constant and can be calculated in advance and only once. 2) The same goes for field IDs - we can calculate them only once. 3) Some small writes can be merged into a bigger one. E.g. 1 byte header + 1 byte user flag + 4 bytes type ID can be written as 1 pre-calculated long. In some cases writeInt(fieldId) + writeInt(fieldLen) == writeLong([constant]), etc.. 4) No need for raw-mode checks for non-"marshal-aware" objects. 5) Memory bounds checks can be removed in lots cases when fields are of fixed size. 6) In extreme scenario of object having all fields of a fixed size it can be written as follows: [request enough memory] + [constant_part1] + [field1] + [constant_part2] + [field2] + [...]. Deeper work on this can give even more ideas. When I applied some of these things in .Net it gave me about ~40% marshalling throughput increase in particular scenario. For .Net this is very important because marshalling is one of the main reasons why it is slower than Java. Being a micro-opt separately, together these things can significantly reduce marshalling CPU consumption. Probably we can use some of these techniques in Java as well. Vladimir.
