[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 02:29:01PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
>   Exactly.  It's what C++ should have been.  I believe the world would 
> be a much better place if:
> 
>   - C++ would completely disappear
>   - Java would be renamed to C++
>   - the "virtual machine" aspect of Java would be completely removed
>   - all Java implementations would compile to native binaries

One question.  If we used Java instead of C++, how would we do inline
assembly? 
 
> Aside from that, in a large complex application, performance was 
> consistent, accurate, and stable on:
> 
>   - RS/6000 running AIX
>   - PeeCee running Linux
>   - PeeCee running Windows (with the exception above)
>   - UltraSPARC running Solaris9
>   - PPC G4 running MacOS X
> 
>   Now yes, these are the machines that you mentioned...but, for a 
> commercial product, what else would you really want to run it on??

MIPS/Irix, HP/UX/PA-RISC, Tru64/VMS/Alpha, Itanium/Linux,
PPC64/Linux/zOS and perhaps just maybe NetBSD.  Not saying Java doesn't
run well on those, just that they are possible platforms for a
commercial product.  If it was something server based that didn't rely
on proprietary hardware, it would seem to me that you wouldn't want to
limit your support platforms more than nescesary.
 
>   Well it's a commercial product, so I can't give it to you. ;)  But 
> this is not theory, this is where I used to work, and that software is 
> running in quite a few classrooms today.  Saying you don't believe me 
> won't automatically make that software start running slowly. ;)

On a side note, Limewire was almost decent.
 
> >I have certainly had usable Java programs, but no fast ones.
> 
>   Well that all depends on how you write your code. ;)

I was able to get some half decent graphics performance out of it on
SS5s even (a test harness system I had put together for working on
graphics algorithms and direct manipulation graphs).  Not a commercial
product, but I was quite happy to be able to pull it off.
 
>   Of course there is overhead.  I never said "Java is as fast as C".  I 
> said Java code can be quite usably fast.  Now, if you try to run it on 
> a 233MHz Pentium under Windows with a crippled Windows VM, sure, it's 
> going to suck.  But on anything built within the past few years, it is 
> fine.

There is no excuse for java based forms type programs to be slow on a
P233.  There just isn't.  If it is, then someone (perhaps MS) is
seriously screwing things up.
 
> the fact that (regardless of what college professors like to say) C is 
> an extremely low-level language, and Java is an extremely high-level 
> language.

That said, a mediocre programmer who follows the guidelines would likely
turn out faster executing code than a mediocre C programmer.  Real life
doesn't seem to bare this out, but in theory using sort routines and
data structures written by the best minds should be faster than doing
your own poor implementations of them.  The only platform that seem to
even come close to living this out is Squeak and other smalltalks
though, and exactly how much real world stuff do we see come from there?

I still maintain that for the majority of the world, C is the wrong
language.  A language that comes bundled with an appropriate assortment
of data structures for the mediocre programmer is much better.  VB (at
least as of versions 5 and 6) don't meet this description.