Re: [OT] Threads, inelegance, and Java

Davide Libenzi
2001-06-20T16:29:24Z

On 20-Jun-2001 Russell Leighton wrote:
> Ben Greear wrote:
> <snip>
>
>> System-design and elegance are easy to get
>> in Java, and in fact are independent of language. Good c code will beat
>> Java in most cases, performance wise, but lately the difference has become
>> small enough not to matter for most applications.
>
> Rather a sweeping statement.
>
> I don't buy it...depends what you mean by "most applications".
> I bet 90% of the "most" would be better served by
> being written in Visual Basic (or Perl, or Python, or PHP pick your poison
> for a very high level language)...and if you really care about
> resource usage and/or performance you don't
> want a very high high level language and Java does not leap to mind
> as part of the set of credible alternatives.
>
> I had a company that gaves us a tech briefing of their system.
> They dumped mega-bucks into multiple Sun E10000s they needed to run their
> Java apps...
> the were proud of their scalable design, just add more hardware!
> True, the high level design was fine and trivially scalable w/more hw BUT
> what a waste, if their app was done in C they could have
> had it run faster and it would have cost them significantly less (in the
> millions of $$).

1) HW is cheaper than software engineers time

2) to find Java developers is easier than to find C developers

3) the ETA of the same project developed in Java is shorter than the same
project done in C

This depend heavily on the type of project but these are points that every
software Co. has to face when starting a new project.

- Davide