[plug] Religious debate - editor wars

[James Devenish]

In message <3F56EDC0.9090508 at leftclick.com.au>
on Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 03:46:08PM +0800, Ben New wrote:
> Isn't there a port of Linux for Amiga hardware?

Probably ;-) but the CPUs in Amigas are different to the target
architectures of Sun's Java distribution.

> Actually I was waiting for someone to tell me I listed a hardware
> platform among 3 other software platforms

I was too dumb to notice :)

> http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/products/java2cs/download.html
> Looks pretty free
[...]
> I guess I was leaving the native parts out of my definition of "SDK"

Yeah, that is one part of it. But even so: while the SDK is open, it is
merely freeISH (i.e. if you read the license terms, or even just the
"International use restrictions" on the download page, you will see that
it's not sufficient for many "free as in beer" communities).

> True... but again I did say "any other platform which has a port of java 
> available".

Sure, but a unnecessary amount of blood and tears goes into porting
Java, due to the licensing conditions. Providing Java for other
platforms is a harrowing exercise. Even porting new versions of Java to
already-supported platforms is difficult (e.g. can you get JDK 1.4.1 for
Amiga -- I am inclined to think that you cannot). Sun has also become
reluctant to give out information on its processors, and it's just
tremendously wasteful for vendors to force open-source volunteer
developers to reverse-engineer modern products.

> 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?

I usually have multiple JDKs installed, so I would do something like
"time jdk 2 blah; time jdk 3 blah; time jdk 4 blah" to demonstrate the
blah programme getting slower with each revision (`jdk` is my own script
for swapping between JDK environments). I probably have a benchmark
programme achived somewhere but the slowdowns are so widespread that you
could install some JREs a try it for yourself. Note: I find JDK 1.4.x
seems to generate more efficient bytecode than previous JDKs, but using
that bytecode with the JRE 1.4.x is still often slower than using the
that bytecode with JRE < 1.3 or prior.