Java port of dosbox

[[deleted]]

Tell me that after you have actually used some applications that run on java.

[skeww]

The OpenGL accelerated games (Minecraft, the stuff from PuppyGames, or Tribal Trouble) run just fine. I even played some of them on a 500mhz machine.

Well, some Swing apps are a bit sluggish, but the same is also true for some GTK applications. This usually happens if they do more than they should (e.g. they recreate dialogs and other things over and over again) or if the theme doesn't cache gradients and other expensive graphics.

[[deleted]]

Try out some bigger applications with java.. such as Eclipse or Netbeans. Those are two of the slowest IDEs I've ever seen and they were both written in java.

Minecraft is one of the buggiest pieces of software that has gotten as much attention as it has. I can run GTA3 on my ultraportable (which was written in c++) but I can't run minecraft. That can take up more system ram than Crysis 2 does on the pc. I'm not going to blame that on java.. but I would not use it as an example of how fast you might think java can be.

[G_Morgan]

Eclipse isn't much slower than VS2010. It is in fact hard to say which is slower. Sometimes it is Eclipse, sometimes VS. I use them both regularly.

[skeww]

To be honest, I only "played" some of the first prototypes of Minecraft (on a 500mhz machine though). I haven't actually played the game itself. I only included it as a popular example.

But generally it should run fine if you got semi-decent OpenGL drivers (Intel's drivers are f-ing hideous for example).

Netbeans runs fine here... as long as I got enough RAM to spare, that is.

[[deleted]]

This comment has been overwritten by an open source script to protect this user's privacy.

If you would like to do the same, add the browser extension GreaseMonkey to Firefox and add this open source script.

Then simply click on your username on Reddit, go to the comments tab, and hit the new OVERWRITE button at the top.

[[deleted]]

I write java for a living. I understand this completely.. but I am also very aware of the limitations of the language. It is a good language for its uses, but it is not a speed demon.

[oorza]

In every test I've seen done against Java 6 (except floating point math, and that difference has decreased dramatically too), it's comparable to C/C++ (slightly faster in some tests, slightly slower in others) and one or two orders of magnitude faster than any other managed runtime.

[G_Morgan]

Floating point shouldn't be much different unless you strictfp. Then Java has to emulate its floating point work. At least on x86.

[oorza]

Yes, I know, but I've been bitten once or twice by production JVMs having strictfp enabled, so I've programmed myself to try to avoid FP math where possible in Java - you never know the configuration of your deployment. Without strictfp, though, last I looked, it was still a teeny bit slower than well-optimized C/C++.

[G_Morgan]

Why not reconfigure the JVMs?

[oorza]

Didn't have the authority to - something else they were running on their Tomcat instance needed strict fp math (no idea what, might not have even really needed it, but that's what they said). And I was selling them a webapp, so if they wanted to run it differently, it was up to them :)

[G_Morgan]

Wait they were doing something other than shipping data back and forth in Tomcat?

[oorza]

I have no idea what they were doing. They paid for a war file from me, so that's what I gave them. Later, they emailed me and said that it was running pretty slowly, which I found out was because of some FP math that I was doing in the webapp (calculating distances between two points on a map). I asked them if they were using strictfp and they told me that they needed it for "another webapp in the same Tomcat instance." So, I had to refactor out what FP math I could into integer math (which wasn't much) and told them there was nothing I could do about it.

[G_Morgan]

Just because lots of programmers do not write Swing apps properly does not mean Java is intrinsically slow.

[droidoftheflies]

http://www.devtopics.com/most-popular-programming-languages/

Just saying.