Opera moves to WebKit and V8 [LWN.net]

Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Feb 18, 2013 16:50 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Opera moves to WebKit and V8 by anselm
Parent article: Opera moves to WebKit and V8

> Yes, because Java in the 1990s gave you the joint benefit of both spending hours compiling stuff and waiting for the JVM to muddle through the code.
Java compilation was fast enough not to care about it. And JVM has had a JIT compiler since 96.

> Tcl/Tk is a lot better than its reputation.
Blergh. I remember hours of debugging trying to find where it concatenated strings incorrectly. Thanks, but no thanks.

Now, Smalltalk (and Strongtalk) might have been more widespread. That might have been more interesting.

> It is probably telling that Tcl/Tk, while never having had much of a marketing force behind it, is still popular in many places – and not unimportant ones, either.
Thankfully, it's getting used less and less.

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Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Feb 18, 2013 17:19 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

And JVM has had a JIT compiler since 96.

For the record, HotSpot came out in 1999 and became the default in Java 1.3, which was released in 2000. The HotSpot JVM was also not a particularly portable program, so the performance benefits of JIT were by no means universal to all Java platforms. (Which was fine by Sun because it meant that for reasonable server-side performance you pretty much had to be running Solaris.)

Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Feb 18, 2013 17:28 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

For the record, JIT compiler (not a HotSpot compiler) become available in JVM 1.1 in 96. This JVM actually had a pluggable JIT interface, so there was a couple of custom JITs.

The first HotSpot JIT was present in JRE 1.2 (that's why it was called 'Java 2') later in 97.

Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Feb 18, 2013 21:23 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I suppose that adding a JIT that finally delivered on the research done previously on Self at Sun Microsystems probably did merit a major version bump, but Sun (and coincidentally Oracle) were masters at a bit of version bumping to warm over products getting a lukewarm reception.

For the record, I stumbled upon Java, Tcl/Tk, Python and a bunch of other languages at the same time, in around 1995. Java was the only one that needed me to get a disk quota upgrade and an account on a flaky Solaris server (whereas the others all ran on SunOS and a multitude of other platforms). I recall a colleague during my summer job showing me Java for the first time: Duke the Java mascot waving in an applet; premium UltraSPARC workstation required.

To be fair, I did get some mileage out of Java for a university project, doing a bit of graphics in AWT instead of using Xlib like everybody else, but a few months later I would saved myself the hassle of the dubious AWT implementation and used something like Python and Tk instead.

Sorry, how did we get onto this again?