Java

[Brian Lloyd <brian@lloyd.com>]

At 07:08 PM 3/25/99 +600, you wrote:
>Not to start a religious or flame war, but I've tried several large
applications
>written in Java, and I'm sorry, I won't do it anymore. They're slower than
molasses
>in the winter on my P200 (which used to be fast), and even with my 64MB of
RAM
>(which used to be a lot), they take all of that and want more. On both
Windows
>and Linux.

We did a fair bit of benchmarking and found huge differences in the various
VMs.  Many of the reference VMs from Javasoft don't support JIT so they are
slow.  When you get a good JIT JVM that supports native threading on
Solaris or NT, we were seeing performance on the order of 50%-70% the speed
of the same thing coded in C when compiled with GCC.  We wrote a very high
performance RADIUS server in Java and demonstrated performance two orders
of magnituded (yes, 100 times) better than anything anyone else had built.

>C/C++ is almost as portable. As long as you decouple the GUI from the core
functionality
>and don't use any OS specific file handling or other system calls, it isn't
>all *that* hard. Sure, it's more work, but I think it's worth it on all other
>levels. Besides, there are more and more good cross-platform GUI kits that
make
>that easier to do now (open source, too). If you start out designing the
program
>to be portable, it will stay that way.

We also found that code gets debugged more quickly in Java than in C.

>Of course, I've never worked on a large cross-platform project, so take what
>I say with a grain of salt :-).

Well, when my boss said, "Oh, and it has to run on these twelve different
platforms," I opted for Java.  The learning curve was steep and the
language was immature but it has gotten much better.  I think that, today,
you can do production work with it.


Brian Lloyd                                    Lucent Technologies
brian@lloyd.com                                3461 Robin Lane, Suite 1
http://www.livingston.com                      Cameron Park, CA  95682
+1.530.676.6513 - voice                        +1.530.676.3442 - fax    O-

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