From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T00:45:59+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C - Part 2, comparing C, Ruby and Java

Charles O Nutter wrote:
> Not bad, really, but not even as good as the bogus Java numbers below.
The Java numbers are what was genuinely produced by the Java system on 
my computer. What grounds do you have to call them bogus? State clearly 
how to time a Java program in such a way that you will not call it bogus 
that can also be applied to the other languages here. Remember the Perl 
interpreter must be loaded and the source compiled each time the Perl 
version is run, somehow I don't recall you saying that the Perl numbers 
were bogus.

> Second, you're not a very good Java programmer if you didn't know 
> about this
> limit. Perhaps they didn't teach you this in Java class in 1992? (a 
> response
> troll, admittedly)
>
I have never encountered this limit before, but then again I have never 
had the urge to do this sort of program in Java, I used it to do ALife 
and other simulations. How about you submit your version of the problem 
in Java, I can then run it on my system in the manner you will describe 
so that you wont call it 'bogus' and we use those timings. If you are 
going to question someone's programming prowess then we can only ask 
that the master himself teaches us how to to it properly.
> Some versions of Java have taken as much as 15 seconds to start up on
> certain platforms, and the startup time on Linux is frequently slower 
> than
> on other platforms.  Java 5 on Windows takes perhaps a second to start up
> now, primarily because they do use a shared-memory cache of much of the
> static data loaded at startup. Of course, it's not a startup cost of 
> zero,
> but people simply don't use Java for command-line tools.
Where are you coming from? We use plenty of command line tools that are 
written in Java here. Tools to parse, validate and transform XML. Schema 
and RelaxNG checkers. There are plenty of command line tools written in 
Java that are used daily by people all over the world, where you pulled 
the 'people simply don't use Java for command-line tools' from?

I look forward to seeing your code.