Could I use Java or c#? [was: Re: re-writing college books]

[crispin at novell.com (Crispin Cowan)]

Robin Sheat wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 November 2006 13:28, Crispin Cowan wrote:
>   
> > It means that compromising performance 
> >     
> It's not necessarily a given that runtime performance is compromised. There 
> are situations where Java is faster than C (I've tested this on trivial 
> things).
Here it is "bytecode vs. native code generator", not "Java vs. C."
Remember, I advocated Java over C++ in the first place :)

Even in the bytecode vs. native code generator contest, there are cases
where each will win:

    * bytecode interpreters always lose; they really are just a kludge
    * JIT can win if it uses dynamic profiling effectively and the
      application is amenable to optimization for decisions that need to
      be evaluated at runtime
    * JIT can be a lose because of the latency required to JIT the code
      instead of compiling ahead of time

So:

    * JIT will win if your application is long-lived, and has a lot of
      dynamic decision making to do, e.g. making a lot of deep object
      member function calls that are virtual, or just a lot of
      conditional branches.
    * Native code will win if your applications are just short-lived,
      because they are dispatched as children from a dispatcher process
          o You pat the JIT cost each time it starts
          o The short lifespan doesn't give dynamic profiling time to do
            its thing


> Personally, I find the programmer time to be much better used in Java too. 
>   
No argument from me. I advocate Java, I just want a native code
generator instead of bytecode.

Crispin

-- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.                      http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/
Director of Software Engineering, Novell  http://novell.com
     Hack: adroit engineering solution to an unanticipated problem
     Hacker: one who is adroit at pounding round pegs into square holes