Kiss of Death [LWN.net]

Kiss of Death

Posted Aug 16, 2007 23:33 UTC (Thu) by dw (subscriber, #12017)
In reply to: Kiss of Death by ncm
Parent article: Buddi - Personal finance software for the rest of us

Demanding by your standard here seems to be a measure of OS integration or ease of packaging. After using OS X for a year I can happily report that there were certain apps I didn't even realize were written in Java.

OS X also has single-click access to jar files, with very little noticeable startup performance hit.

This makes me think your problem is with contemporary Linux rather than Java. :)

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Kiss of Death

Posted Aug 17, 2007 5:56 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]

> OS X also has single-click access to jar files, with very little noticeable > startup performance hit.

Because after OSX bounces a few icons, twists a few windows, and spins a couple widgets, you're not going to notice a 'lil ole thing like a JVM starting up.

Kiss of Death

Posted Aug 17, 2007 10:02 UTC (Fri) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link]

I'm not sure it's just that. Compare and contrast to Mono startup on Linux which in my anecdotal experience is much faster than JVM startup on Linux. Maybe the OS X folk sat down and figured out why the disk clicks so much and the CPU burns so brightly? Seems the Mono folk have done something like that.

Kiss of Death

Posted Aug 21, 2007 12:48 UTC (Tue) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

From a Mono JIT developer.. thanks for the appreciating our work :-)

But in this case, to be really fair, it's not just that we took care to tune the startup, the main factor is that the .NET "class" file format (the files we call assemblies) is much better thought out than the jar (and .class) file formats.

Even the .NET bytecode is easier to JIT than the Java equivalent!

IMHO, Microsoft learned from Java's technical mistakes, and improved the situation a lot. Not that I blame the Java designers (they did it more than one decade ago), but .NET is really an improvement on many fronts.