Right, a naive implementation of anything going up a finely tuned one will generally behave accordingly even if the naive one is using fundamentally better CS :). I would naturally assume that J3 on VMKit is more a proof of concept of VMKit, at least until a lot of people start hacking on it. The other use of LLVM in OpenJDK Shark is about portability rather than pure speed.
The Sun JVM is pretty well tuned. A lot of people have a lot of money riding on top of it performing well. There is room for improvement (see Azul) but I would be surprised if a FOSS project would break much ground without major commercial backing.
Static compilation would have a lot of benefits for short lived programs. I know IBM's i OS (OS/400) used to use statically compiled Java and was quite a bit faster than that era JRE, but it's somewhat cloudy as the whole machine was quasi-VM with the MI level. Not sure if they retained this but it would be interesting to compare now days to i.e. HotSpot in Java 7.
The Sun JVM is pretty well tuned. A lot of people have a lot of money riding on top of it performing well. There is room for improvement (see Azul) but I would be surprised if a FOSS project would break much ground without major commercial backing.
Static compilation would have a lot of benefits for short lived programs. I know IBM's i OS (OS/400) used to use statically compiled Java and was quite a bit faster than that era JRE, but it's somewhat cloudy as the whole machine was quasi-VM with the MI level. Not sure if they retained this but it would be interesting to compare now days to i.e. HotSpot in Java 7.