Java (was: Re: bsd daemon chick wallpaper??)

[Daniel Eischen]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Miguel Mendez wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:07:37 -0500
> Pete Ehlke <pde at rfc822.net> wrote:
> 
> > What's even more amazing is how quickly even the most carefully,
> > tightly crafted java script (yes, script. java is *interpreted*,
> > dammit) can eat up 384 Mb of RAM.
> 
> Hmm, have you ever heard of JIT compilers? The gcc guys also have the
> gcj project, but I'm not up to date on its status. 
> 
> > "An 11 Mb RSS and 10 second startup time just to say 'Hello world'.
> > That's not too bad, really, is it?"
> 
> I know you're joking here, but java shines in the server side in cases
> where cpu is hardly the bottleneck. Or do you write your business
> middleware in C? As I got into the subject, java has gotten a bad image
> partly thanks to abominations like Swing. Those who have played or
> used those nifty java interfaces like the Volume Manager UI or 
> Forte for java will surely know what I'm talking about. Extremely slow
> interfaces that love crashing. I'm not really a big java fan myself, but
> it has its place, and it's not in the desktop IMHO.

Your comment regarding Swing seems to support what I've seen
here at work.  We had two similar GUI interfaces.  One was
implemented in Personal Java (it had to run embedded under
VxWorks) and the other using JDK1.4.x with Swing.   I was
the lead for the PJava GUI and we ended up implementing
a lot of Swing-like API so that we could easily transition
to it if it ever became available for our target.  A good portion
of our application was just the Swing-like classes that we
developed.  The PJava application ended up being smaller
(SLOC-wise) and consuming much less resources and CPU than
the other similar-looking GUI implemented with Swing.

Of course, we knew we were running embedded and tried
to avoid dynamic allocation of things.  I wasn't directly
involved with the Swing application, so it may have
turned out a bit differently had they been more concerned
with resource utilization.

I did really learn to like programming in Java.  I thought
the networking was pretty cool too.

-- 
Dan Eischen