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Aside from one of the most popular... Minecraft (played for days and never saw a GC pause). I think it actually is because of blind prejudice OR POSSIBLY expres

Aside from one of the most popular... Minecraft (played for days and never saw a GC pause). I think it actually is because of blind prejudice OR POSSIBLY expressiveness rather than "slowness" since most of the scripting languages within the game platforms also make use of GC systems that are much worse than the JVMs.

yati 14y ago
Umm.. Minecraft, while awesome, is certainly not one of the graphically intensive games out there, and yet the Java promise of hogging all resources available is always kept.
adambard 14y ago
Minecraft is a lot of fun, but hardly a paragon of performance.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Minecraft is a special case because it works differently than many other games. However, it's hardly a poster boy for the awesome speed of the java platform. For one, performance (measured in fps) is highly variable on the same hardware from release to release. As far as scripting languages used in game platforms, it's one thing to use a scripting for minor tasks within a system written in other languages, it's something else entirely to write an entire game in that language.
Quequau 14y ago
I'm one of those folks who suspects that projects which were written in Java might be slower that they otherwise would have been. I also bought Minecraft some time ago (back when it was roughly €7). Having used Minecraft for a pretty long time, I don't feel like it's the sort of thing someone should hold up as exemplary of how fast Java is / can be. Instead, for me at least, it's more evidence of Java apps having troubles making use of available system resources (particularly many cores and/or larger amounts of RAM) as well as demonstrating that portability still can be a problem with Java apps (as in OpenGL v OpenGL ES; MCPC v. MCPE, MCPI & MC360; and even windows v Linux & Mac). I get that it is possible to write Java such that certain things run pretty fast. I also don't think that these sorts of metrics should be used as the only metric every developer uses to decide what language to use for their projects. Therefore, I don't feel that these are reasons to conclude that someone else should or shouldn't use java for their project (as surely they have their own priorities which they base their own decisions on). On the other-hand I don't think that any software programming language having advanced features which allow for efficient use of these various other system resources matters much, if many (most?, most popular?, many popular?) projects don't use them (or perhaps don't use them correctly). For that matter the same goes with hardware... it hardly matters if some chip has amazing super powers, if few projects use them. Back to why people think Java app can be slower than they ought to be. My experience has been that when Java first began to become popular, it became the language of choice in many universities. Not long after that it was common to find poorly designed & implemented projects to be written in Java. While this has changed by now, nearly all of the Java projects, that I have experience with don't have an obvious priority of maximising performance by using all available system resources as efficiently as they can be.
DanBC 14y ago
Minecraft is an odd example. Lots of people say that Minecraft has minimal requirements; but then a lot of people say that Minecraft has terrible performance because it's written in Java and 'Java is slow'. Many of those people (both groups) are naive users who don't know much about computing or programming or games. Or they're games players so they have a different idea of what "minimal requirements" means. (A dual core 1.8 GHz processor; 3 GB ram; don't feel 'minimal' to me, but perhaps that's my age.)

yati 14y ago

Umm.. Minecraft, while awesome, is certainly not one of the graphically intensive games out there, and yet the Java promise of hogging all resources available is always kept.

adambard 14y ago

Minecraft is a lot of fun, but hardly a paragon of performance.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Minecraft is a special case because it works differently than many other games. However, it's hardly a poster boy for the awesome speed of the java platform. For one, performance (measured in fps) is highly variable on the same hardware from release to release. As far as scripting languages used in game platforms, it's one thing to use a scripting for minor tasks within a system written in other languages, it's something else entirely to write an entire game in that language.

Quequau 14y ago

I'm one of those folks who suspects that projects which were written in Java might be slower that they otherwise would have been. I also bought Minecraft some time ago (back when it was roughly €7). Having used Minecraft for a pretty long time, I don't feel like it's the sort of thing someone should hold up as exemplary of how fast Java is / can be. Instead, for me at least, it's more evidence of Java apps having troubles making use of available system resources (particularly many cores and/or larger amounts of RAM) as well as demonstrating that portability still can be a problem with Java apps (as in OpenGL v OpenGL ES; MCPC v. MCPE, MCPI & MC360; and even windows v Linux & Mac). I get that it is possible to write Java such that certain things run pretty fast. I also don't think that these sorts of metrics should be used as the only metric every developer uses to decide what language to use for their projects. Therefore, I don't feel that these are reasons to conclude that someone else should or shouldn't use java for their project (as surely they have their own priorities which they base their own decisions on). On the other-hand I don't think that any software programming language having advanced features which allow for efficient use of these various other system resources matters much, if many (most?, most popular?, many popular?) projects don't use them (or perhaps don't use them correctly). For that matter the same goes with hardware... it hardly matters if some chip has amazing super powers, if few projects use them. Back to why people think Java app can be slower than they ought to be. My experience has been that when Java first began to become popular, it became the language of choice in many universities. Not long after that it was common to find poorly designed & implemented projects to be written in Java. While this has changed by now, nearly all of the Java projects, that I have experience with don't have an obvious priority of maximising performance by using all available system resources as efficiently as they can be.

DanBC 14y ago

Minecraft is an odd example. Lots of people say that Minecraft has minimal requirements; but then a lot of people say that Minecraft has terrible performance because it's written in Java and 'Java is slow'. Many of those people (both groups) are naive users who don't know much about computing or programming or games. Or they're games players so they have a different idea of what "minimal requirements" means. (A dual core 1.8 GHz processor; 3 GB ram; don't feel 'minimal' to me, but perhaps that's my age.)