100% of the hype around Java was that it was "write once, run anywhere". That was the marketing slogan for it, after all. And remember, in the 90s cross-platfor

100% of the hype around Java was that it was "write once, run anywhere". That was the marketing slogan for it, after all. And remember, in the 90s cross-platform was HARD. We had Windows NT, Windows 98, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, big endian, little endian, weird filesystems (resource fork, anyone?). gcc wasn't even cross-platform, so good luck cross-compiling things. You had to somehow write one C++ codebase that would compile in Metrowerks CodeWarrior, MS Visual Studio, GCC, and across different endian CPUs, or compilers with different definitions for int and long. Plus, the standard libraries for these systems were radically different. No one even tried to solve this problem until Java came along and made it performant through bytecode JIT.