[plug] Religious debate - editor wars

[James Devenish]

In message <3F56E46E.8010801 at leftclick.com.au>
on Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 03:06:22PM +0800, Ben New wrote:
> I've seen a couple of anti-java sentiments in here and was wondering 
> where this is coming from? Let me guess, something about Suncorp being 
> analagous to M$ as a corporation?

For me (as a Solaris admin and a Java programmer), my gripes are nothing
to do with Sun as a corporation per se.

> because you can use the same tool in winblows and linux and macos and
> amiga any other platform which has a port of java available)..."

Amiga? Well hold on...Sun's Java is only available on a LIMITED number
of platforms (not including Amiga). While you *can* get the Java source
code for large amount of the Sun's Java runtime (although it's not
entirely free, it is included in Sun's regular distribution), Sun's
platform-specific components are not freely available (or, rather, they
weren't when I was last working with Java). Other platforms have to make
to with *platform emulation* (usually Linux emulation) or a complete
re-implementation of the platform-specific components. For free software
distributions, a complete re-implementation of the entire runtime is
required (incl.  non platform-specific components). Thus, Sun forces
reimplementation-from-scratch for free Java distributions. But I'm more
annoyed with declining performance.