4 ms·
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
by Quequau 13y 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.