[plug] Religious debate - editor wars

[Ben New]

James Devenish wrote:

>Amiga? Well hold on...Sun's Java is only available on a LIMITED number
>of platforms (not including Amiga).
>
Isn't there a port of Linux for Amiga hardware? Actually I was waiting 
for someone to tell me I listed a hardware platform among 3 other 
software platforms but oh well... (unless you read "Amiga" as 
"Workbench" in which case you are right, there is no Java for that).

>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), 
>
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/products/java2cs/download.html
Looks pretty free ;-) ...Interesting that 1.4.2 isn't released in source 
yet though.

>Sun's platform-specific components are not freely available (or, rather, they
>weren't when I was last working with Java).
>
Hmmmm... I did say "you can get the Java SDK source code"... I guess I 
was leaving the native parts out of my definition of "SDK" ;-)

>Other platforms have to make
>to with *platform emulation* (usually Linux emulation) or a complete
>re-implementation of the platform-specific components. 
>
True... but again I did say "any other platform which has a port of java 
available".

>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.
>
OK all that is true... but it does make sense from Sun's point of view. 
I mean, otherwise I could just download the source code, change a few 
lines or add my own extensions, then bango I've got myself a unique 
downloadable resource for my website.

>But I'm more annoyed with declining performance.
>  
>
Well now this is the bit I've heard on the plug list already and from 
other people. I've written apps using Java 1.1.3 with AWT and I've 
written apps using Java 1.3/4.x with Swing. I'm not saying I've done 
empirical measurements, but I didn't notice any decrease in performance. 
Can anyone give concrete examples of what has slowed down from Java 1.1 
to Java 1.4?

Regards,
Ben