[Xastir-dev] Topic: Supported Platforms, Xastir-NG

[Magne Mæhre]

Curt, WE7U wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jun 2008, Jason KG4WSV wrote:
> 
>> Java, Ruby, Python, et al, seem to me to be rather heavy in terms of
>> system requirements good performance.  Is this true?  My knee-jerk
>> reaction is that the smaller devices (handhelds, old 486 computers,
>> etc) would be strained by the resource requirements for such a system.
> 
> I think Java ME is designed to support smaller devices.  Java SE and
> Java EE are definitely for larger machines.

This is correct.  I guess most portable phones and PDAs today have
Java ME support.   Java EE is mostly a collection of APIs and support
libraries for application servers, while Java SE is what most people
think of as Java.

> 
>> The (limited, anecdotal) experience I have with applications
>> implemented in these languages make me think they'd run faster if
>> written in C/C++.
> 
> There are native-code compilers for Java that compile down to each
> machines assembly.  Instead of byte-codes and a run-time
> interpreter, you have native-code.

A very usable feature is the Hotspot compiler.  It is run-time
compilation based on the execution pattern (i.e it compiles
to machine code the stubs that are executed most often, and performs
branch optimization based on runtime statistics etc.).  The
hotspot compiler is turned on by  default in the Sun JVM (and
probably the IBM JVM too)

<soapbox>
Most rumors about Java being slow originates in the old days. For
numeric calculation tasks, it's still quite a bit slower than C or
FORTRAN, but only on the scale of  2x or 3x.  For quite a few tasks,
the hotspot compiler can have the code run as fast as C code.  It's
true that the early Java GUI applications sucked.  I will say that this
is mostly not true anymore, although the occasional bad-written app
turns up and "confirms" the belief :)

I don't think this is what should decide which programming language
to use.  Python, for one, is horribly slow,  but it can be well suited
for many tasks.

So, lets find a language and environment which is productive,
maintainable, and with good available libraries.
</soapbox>

--Magne