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> Right, but in the mid '90s when Java was designed, 64 bit machines were basically an exotic architecture No they weren't, not in the enterprise market. At ho
by znpy 4y ago
> Right, but in the mid '90s when Java was designed, 64 bit machines were basically an exotic architecture
No they weren't, not in the enterprise market. At home? sure.
SUN Microsystems released the Sparc v9 architecture in 1993. SUN also made the Java language and JVM.
- krzyk 4y agoWasn't java targeted at embedded? AFAIR at some point it was marketed that it will be in every washing machine, fridge. There a was HotJava browser, weren't servers just a small part of its target?
- jbverschoor 4y ago"Write Once, Run Everywhere" was their slogan. There's Java Card for smartcards yes. There was also Java Micro Edition (j2me) for phones.
- fweimer 4y agoMost binaries were still 32-bit for performance reason, and I don't think that Java 1.2 had a 64-bit port yet, not even on Solaris/SPARC. The situation that an x86-64 build is faster than an i386 build of most applications (exception extremely pointer-heavy ones) is a bit of an exception because x86-64 added additional registers and uses a register-based calling convention everywhere. That happens to counteract the overhead of 64-bit pointers in most cases. Other 64-bit architectures with 32-bit userspace compatibility kept using 32-bit userspace for quite some time.