[coyotos-dev] Accept GCJ into the tool chain?

[Daniel Simoes]

Hi. I never wrote before, but I feel obligated to contribute because of 
my years of java embedded development.
Sorry for my English, it's very poor. And, if I appear rude, it's 
actually lack of language fluency.

> I don't suggest it. Java has a lot of problems, the biggest being that 
> java is /entirely/ decoded at runtime.
What do you mean by decoded? Interpreted? Compiled? If it's interpreted, 
that's not true. Modern virtual machines uses JIT compiling
and hotspots performing very well. And by using GCJ you don't have even 
a runtime compiling phase at all.
> Java has always had the drawback of being slow, and even on MacOSX 
> where java is (or at least was) a major supported language for 
> applications, they were always notoriously slow and usually ugly.
It was true three or four years ago.
I've wrote a few mobile and desktop applications in the last years that 
run in slow/low memory machines doing complex tasks
like GIS/mapping performing very well. My first app was, in fact, ugly. 
But then we switched to SWT and now there's no difference
from native ones.
Another thing about performance is that are lots of people doing java 
coding, but a little portion can write good code. It's a problem
caused by java being sold as beginners/"average joe" language. Few 
months ago I had the mission to save a project. There was a task
that used to take 1m40s to complete in a Palm Treo 650. That's 
prohibitive. Rewriting the code, now it runs in 4s. I've seen things like
these a dozen of times...
> Furthermore, coyotos, as you have said many times, is supposed to find 
> its way into integrated applications, specifically in the medical 
> field for stability reasons. If you use java, any applications, many 
> of which will be sensitive, would be at the mercy of the virtual 
> machine. Do you really want applications like that to be forced to run 
> under code which is not your own? 
GCJ, open source virtual machines, etc...
And, who told all the applications must be written in Java?
> Also, java is a pain to develop with,
It's a matter of taste... It's always a pain to use what you don't know 
or don't have experience with. That argument is valid with Lisp, C++ or even
Javascript.
> and not well suited to applications running directly under the OS. 
> Even if you had some other language for your main applications, java 
> has still been proven very poor for that use.
GCJ, JNI, vm customizations....

Daniel Simoes.