Women in Technology

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Article:		10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0
Subject:		Please don't slow down Java more that it already is!
Date:		2004-01-08 02:14:39
From:		anonymous2

"I anticipate resistance to these ideas from the performance-at-any-cost crowd". Well, I guess I'm among that crowd. And I guess you never tried to write scientific computing applications in Java. Apps that manage millions of number, or millions of String (such as the GIS applications we are trying to write at the geotools project). Otherwise you'll know that: * 8 bytes object header overhead is a big problem, so the compiler implementation should really do a hard work at avoiding the object version of primitive to get reasonable performance; * 4 bytes per char strings cannot be optimized and are something that would kill the performance of text processing apps, reduce cache efficiency, and the like. It really seems that you don't play with big data sets, or you'll know that getting out reasonable speed with modern computers is still a hard job * java math is really slow, see for example: http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/almabench.html If I could ask something for Java3, it would really be better performance optimization, especially for scientific applications and/or small devices. Pretending that everyone has a big machine is not the way to build a good language