Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 02:24:19 +0200 From: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: generic compiling programming language? Message-ID: <19970810022419.58644@grendel.IAEhv.nl> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970809111436.5667C-100000@server.local.sunyit.edu>; from Alfred Perlstein on Sat, Aug 09, 1997 at 11:19:14AM %2B0000 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970809111436.5667C-100000@server.local.sunyit.edu>
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(If anyone decides to follow-up on this, be so kind as to edit your headers. No need for me to receive mail twice in two different mailboxes.) Alfred Perlstein shared with us: > > I know C is 'portable' but it still requires some major hacking to get > programs working on various OSes, and Java can be used/compiled almost > everywhere, although i think it requires a graphical display (right?) > and it is pretty slow and not a good choice for many intesive > applications. In essence, no computer language is tied to a specific platform. Every computer with Basic (which is about every computer) can do this: 10 PRINT "Hello, world!" 20 GOTO 20 The trouble comes, when you want something more than the standard offers. With C, C++ and about everything before that, you can open files, read from them and write to them. Perhaps allocate a bit of memory, but after that it's every compiler for itself. Some languages offers concurrency (more or less) or are excellent to fly an F-16 with, but graphics is something that remained out of the picture so far, possibly because GUI's didn't really get into swing before MS-Windows 3.0. (That there were Amiga's, Atari's, Macs and earlier versions of Windows back in '85 doesn't change that.) The fact that Java needs less hacking to be gotten to work on another platform is because the standard includes GUI's, some sound and network connections. At the moment (and mind that: at this moment) that's enough to get it to work on any platform you'd wish. But, as soon as this standard leaves things to be desired, Sun better put those in a standard, or else the same thing will happen to Java as has happened to about any other language: divergation. > Why isn't there a "Java" that is not interpreted? but could be easily > cross compiled for any machine? Well, because that's what Sun's standard says. It remains to be seen if this will stay so in the future, because Microsoft can be a big influence. If MS says that Java is to be compiled into executable code (and thus, that it runs faster on MS-platforms, even compared to a just-in-time compiler), you can bet that the rest will follow. They'll have to. BTW, someone asked (not seriously), why not rewrite the whole kernel in Java. Though hardly feasible, the idea isn't that silly as it may sound. Java does have it's advantages. It's a simple language, at least a heckuva lot simpler than C++, so Joe Programmer is less likely to mess up. It does bounds checking (I want sendmail rewritten in Java) and it's object-oriented. I suspect that a lot of Netscape Communicator is written in Java (but that's just a hunch). Personally, I prefer C++ over Java, because I find the simplicity a bit stiffling. But it's definately more than just a fancy scroll text and watch-my-pictures-light-up tool. Forget the AWT and look at the actual language. - Peter
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