A shamei

A shamei

Posted Apr 8, 2005 0:31 UTC (Fri) by Xman (guest, #10620)
In reply to: A shamei by zooko
Parent article: GCJ - past, present, and future

Based on the stats you collected, it would seem Java is used about as much as Perl. ;-) Java might not be needed for a working Linux system, but the same could be said of C++. Despite that, there is a lot of good open source code out there written in both languages.

Without a decent open source Java, you aren't going to see distros bundling a lot of Java applications (C++ once suffered from a similar problem). You're also going to find applications using it are less popular than those which can easily be built on open source platforms. gcj4 could really change that.

That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of very good open source code out there written in Java. Despite the fact that there hasn't been a really usable open source Java implementation, a lot of open source Java code has been written, which should tell you something. Just to through out a few (and I'm sticking to end-user tools, ignoring some of the amazing development stuff out there with no equivalent elsewhere):

• OpenOffice
• Nutch an open source search engine, based on Lucene
• Ganttproject an open source project planner
• Art of Illusion a free 3D modeling and rendering studio

I could go on.... The point is there is a lot of great quality code out there and we'd be fools to ignore it.

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