Jupiter is written in C using an object-oriented style. Although languages such as Java or C++ would provide more support for an object-oriented programming style, and hence more support for our flexible building block architecture, we elected to use C because we did not have confidence in the ability of other languages to deliver good performance. The current implementation comprises approximately 23,000 lines of C code, in about 170 files.
In this section, we quantify the performance Jupiter delivers on standard benchmarks. We also attempt to show the degree of flexibility Jupiter possesses by arguing the ease with which a number of performance optimizations were implemented.