On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 04:03:13PM +0000, Andrew Savory wrote:
On 3 Nov 2004, at 15:37, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
I like the language, but the lack of a decent implementation holds it back. A fully working Free implementation would be a good start.
Define 'decent' ;-)
I've certainly never had major problems with blackdown on Debian or the OS X implementations of the JDK. Free would be good but is not essential for most people. Do you have other criteria in mind?
To be fair, my main recent experiences with Java are using it with Firefox, where it seems to happily decide to fall over or use lots of memory too often for comfort.
It's about 4 years since I did any real programming in it, but at that stage the Windows, Solaris and Linux JDKs were all pretty good at consuming system resources.
Free is mainly about having it easily distributable; it's a real PITA to get it all working under Debian IME. However I also believe if it was Free then people would be able to sort out the incompatibilities that envitably show up.
As I originally said, I do think the language itself is ok. I'd much rather use it over, say, C++. I just don't tend to due to the perceived overhead. (I'm primarily Perl/C depending on circumstances.)
J.