Why Java is running faster than C here?

Question

Inspired by this question,

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I came up with the following code:

$cat loop.c 
int main(          


        

Answer 1

The Java JIT compiler is smart enough to optimize the loop away, while your C compiler seems to have most of the optimizations turned off.

So you are really comparing the time to start up the Java machine with the time it takes unoptimized C code to count to 2 billion.