[NTLUG:Discuss] Need some inputs on porting.

[Kenneth Loafman]

Steve Baker wrote:
> Stephen Davidson wrote:
> 
>> Now a days, Java is just as fast (and in many cases is faster) than 
>> C/C++.
> 
> 
> Wooaahhh. That has to be HEAVILY qualified (and I'm trying hard not to
> start a language war here).
> 
> For CPU intensive tasks where most of the time is consumed in the language
> itself (ie not waiting for hardware and not inside libraries that are not
> written in JAVA)...then JAVA is at least 50 times slower than C++.
> 
> If your application DOES spend most of it's time inside some other 'time
> sink' then JAVA can come close to the speed of C/C++ - but that's only
> because JAVA isn't doing anything - it's all being done by libraries that
> were almost certainly written in C/C++ and the JAVA code is just the 'glue'
> that holds together the parts that are doing all the work.
> 
> So, it could *almost* tie with C/C++ for speed under those special
> circumstances - but there are no cases that I can imagine where JAVA
> would be faster than C/C++ (unless maybe there are JAVA libraries written
> in C/C++ that are somehow better written than the equivelent C/C++ 
> library -
> but that's a feature of the libraries - not of the language itself).
> 
> That's not to say that JAVA is not the best choice in this case - speed
> isn't everything.


The same is true of Perl or Python.

I would suspect that its a moot point anyway.  With 1 million lines of 
code to port, they would not want to do a rewrite in YAL, yet another 
language.

...Ken