Cyril Hansen wrote:
> With some friends, I am currently designing a new Roleplaying game
> on Linux and we would like to use Java everywhere if possible.
>
> I have downloaded and installed Gcj, the new java front end from egcs,
> and Libgcj, the library implementation which works with it. Both
> are currently only available as snapshots or in CVS but they
> already work well for small programs. We would like to use them
> to benefit from the speed gain.
For your application I don't think the speed gain will be significant.
The network latency will be the overwhelming speed consideration; a
decent server can run a pure-java implementation well enough for you to
design and test it. As someone else pointed out, by the time you are
done the VMs will also be better; but I would maintain that even with
today's VMs you'll be fine - although my experience is limited to
Solaris SPARC servers. (Solaris x86 is available for the cost of the
media plus shipping ($35 in the USA - see
http://www.sun.com/solaris/freesolaris.html).)
I've been running an arcade-style war game (http://play.mpog.com/europa)
since 1996 and the performance problems are almost exclusively to do
with people's network connections (the remainder are my bugs :-).
alex
