The cross-platform features have been extremely important to the success of Java, because they have greatly expanded the number of libraries available to developers.
On Haskell Cafe, not a week goes by that Windows (and sometimes Mac) developers don't complain about not being able to use some Hackage library because of cross-platform issues. The actual number of people encountering these issues is orders of magnitude larger than the number of posts you see here. These issues impede the growth of Haskell significantly.
Moreover, the importance of cross-platform libraries on the Java platform is evinced by the fact that developers of major native libraries _always_ make their libraries cross-platform (Jogl, jmonkeyengine, swt, etc.). They wouldn't go to this trouble if it weren't something the community was demanding.
From a risk management perspective, a manager really likes the ability to seamlessly move across platforms and architectures without recompilation. 32 -> 64? No problem. Linux -> BSD? Sure, why not? Yes, I'm sure even Amazon, Yahoo, and Google make these kinds of considerations.
Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101 On Sep 30, 2009, at 5:28 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
Nobody consider the runtime download of Java code important nowadays. Not even the cross-platform features. but it was marketeed at his time as such.
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