Software developers typically must choose between interpreted and compiled environments for their programming activities. However, the current trends toward mobile computing and platform independence suggest moving to a new continuous compilation paradigm that integrates the advantages of each environment. Movement in this direction can already be seen in the development of Sun Microsystems' Java environment.

The resulting continuous compiler operates not as a prelude to, but rather in tandem with, program execution. In this thesis we present the results of experiments that compare the performance of the continuous compilation model with a more traditional model and show that a performance increase can be obtained by moving to continuous compilation. In addition, we examine the effects of various compilation strategies on the performance of the continuous compiler.