Curt, WE7U wrote: > On Sun, 15 Jun 2008, Jason KG4WSV wrote: > >> Java, Ruby, Python, et al, seem to me to be rather heavy in terms of >> system requirements good performance. Is this true? My knee-jerk >> reaction is that the smaller devices (handhelds, old 486 computers, >> etc) would be strained by the resource requirements for such a system. > > I think Java ME is designed to support smaller devices. Java SE and > Java EE are definitely for larger machines.
This is correct. I guess most portable phones and PDAs today have Java ME support. Java EE is mostly a collection of APIs and support libraries for application servers, while Java SE is what most people think of as Java. > >> The (limited, anecdotal) experience I have with applications >> implemented in these languages make me think they'd run faster if >> written in C/C++. > > There are native-code compilers for Java that compile down to each > machines assembly. Instead of byte-codes and a run-time > interpreter, you have native-code. A very usable feature is the Hotspot compiler. It is run-time compilation based on the execution pattern (i.e it compiles to machine code the stubs that are executed most often, and performs branch optimization based on runtime statistics etc.). The hotspot compiler is turned on by default in the Sun JVM (and probably the IBM JVM too) <soapbox> Most rumors about Java being slow originates in the old days. For numeric calculation tasks, it's still quite a bit slower than C or FORTRAN, but only on the scale of 2x or 3x. For quite a few tasks, the hotspot compiler can have the code run as fast as C code. It's true that the early Java GUI applications sucked. I will say that this is mostly not true anymore, although the occasional bad-written app turns up and "confirms" the belief :) I don't think this is what should decide which programming language to use. Python, for one, is horribly slow, but it can be well suited for many tasks. So, lets find a language and environment which is productive, maintainable, and with good available libraries. </soapbox> --Magne _______________________________________________ Xastir-dev mailing list Xastir-dev@xastir.org http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir-dev
