New Java looks to shake up desktop

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What planet?

I code mainly in Java. Our applications process the data from the human genome project. We-ve run them on everything from laptops to 400+ node clusters and from machines with 32M ram up to monsters with 64G ram. Java 1.5 provides us with loads of benefits over c++ or .net. In my experience, with a modern vm, if you're not doing graphics, Java only sucks for performance if you've written sucky code. 10 minutes with a profiler usually tells you where the bottle-neck is.

1) we can run it on a beowulf cluster (and with rmi and some smart mpi libs treat the cluster as a single machine)

2) it performs better than the equivalent c++ applications - both for heavily numeric operations (matrix maths - see colt) and for heavily object-oriented applications - often it runs faster than the equivalent c program because we re-use so much code between programs that the core functionality is realy heavily optimized, where as the naive c code gets re-written each time, so never is optimized to death

3) it is quick to develop and debug - particularly with generics - throw in some design patterns and you can assemble your own program from off-the-shelf components in your libraries

4) it never hoses the host machine, even when we do hairy things like run-time code generation, because the VM protects us from ourselves

5) threading support just works - ok, you have to code your app to be thread-safe, but come on, how much easier are Java threads to work with than pthreads or windows threads - be honest (oh, and 1.5 throws in a load of concurrency tools that rock)

So, we seem to have radically different experiences of Java performance. Perhaps when downloading Java with explorer, you let in some actual spy-ware without noticing?

Posted by: drdozer   Posted on: 10/01/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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