What is native implementation in Java

Question

If we look at the Java Object class then we can find some of the methods like
public native int hashCode(), protected native Object clone(),
so my question is what are these natives and how do these methods work?

Answer 1

Native methods in Java are implemented using the 'Java Native Interface', known as JNI.

Answer 2

Native methods are implemented mostly in C and compiled to native code which runs directly on the machine. This is in contrast to normal methods, which are implemented in Java and compiled to Java byte code, which is executed by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

To interface to these methods from Java you need to use the Java Native Interface (JNI).

Native code is mostly needed for accessing low-level stuff. In the case of hashCode this is the address of the object in memory. My guess for clone is that it copies the raw memory from a give object to the cloned one. Other uses of native code are for access to OS features or hardware.

The drawback of using native code is that you lose the safety and security of the JVM, i.e. your program might crash or have security holes due to bugs in the native code.

Answer 3

These methods are written outside Java in "native" code, that is, specific to the given machine. The ones you mention are part of the JDK but you can also write them yourself using the Java Native Interface (JNI).

This would normally use C to write the methods, but a lot of other languages, such as python allow you to write methods this way fairly easily.

Code is written this way either for performance, or because it needs to access platform specific infrastructure which cannot be done in plain java.

In the case of hashcode(), this is because often the hashcode will be related to the objects location in memory, which can only be accessed at the native level.

Answer 4

Most native methods are implemented using JNI as mentioned in other answers.

However, performance critical methods such as Object.hashCode are typically implemented as intrinsics. When the byte code is compiled into machine code, the Java compiler recognises the method call and inlines appropriate code directly. This is obviously going to be much faster than going through JNI for a trivial method.

Many people will claim that Object.hashCode will return the address of the object representation in memory. In modern implementations objects actually move within memory. Instead an area of the object header is used to store the value, which may be lazily derived from the memory address at the time that the value is first requested.