Geek.com is running an opinion piece on the extensive reliance of programmers today on languages like Java and .NET. The author lambastes the performance penalties that are associated with running code inside virtualised environments, like Java's and .NET's. "It increases the compute burden on the CPU because in order to do something that should only require 1 million instructions (note that on modern CPUs 1 million instructions executes in about one two-thousandths (1/2000) of a second) now takes 200 million instructions. Literally. And while 200 million instructions can execute in about 1/10th of a second, it is still that much slower." The author poses an interesting challenge at the end of his piece - a challenge most OSNews readers will have already taken on. Note: Please note that many OSNews items now have a "read more" where the article in question is discussed in more detail.
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Member since:2005-07-24
Today, Java desktop apps are not exactly slow. But the slowness has been replaced by a tendency to be horrendously irritating. Download LimeWire and you will quickly become afraid to move your mouse. Because every time you move it, say, a quarter inch, you get a new and annoying popup giving you all the gory details about another song you didn't really care about, and blotting out your view of something that you *did* care about.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-03-27
The only java based, full fledged application I have any experience with is Eclipse and my experience has been that Eclipse is significantly and noticeably slower that other IDEs. It's usable on a fast, modern system with lots of memory but I have Linux loaded on a couple of older, slower boxes with half a gig of memory and using Eclipse on them is downright painful.
I'm also not sure I agree with either the original article or the response above when it comes to operating systems. I use a computer that is on the military's NMCI network on a daily basis. Because of government requirements, it's still running Windows 2k. It's not noticeably faster than similar machines running XP, but neither do I notice any significant decrease in capability.
Member since:
2005-09-28
Many of us had our first go at running Java desktop apps back in the mid 90s. Unfortunately, Swing was very slow at that point and this created the myth, in the mind of many people, that Java is slow.
I think that Java could have made massive inroads into the desktop if only Sun had worked harder to polish Swing performance in the early days.