[plug] Religious debate - editor wars

[Ben New]

>>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 :)
>
That's okay, I wrote it and I only noticed after I read it being quoted 
in your response ;-) How dumb does that make me?

>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).
>  
>
>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.
>
It's obviously a lot more (legally/commercially) technical that I ever 
bothered looking into. Obviously I've never experienced porting Java to 
another platform... Sounds like that could be a pretty good thing ;-)

>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.
>  
>
Interesting... I'll get back to you on this one :-)

Ben