Ewan Birney wrote:
I'd be surprised(ish) if memory overhead caused you *too much* of a problem - it's more of a problem if you want to write programs with really small footprints. However pushing the envelope, in terms of extracting the maximum from a given piece of hardware, clearly isn't one of Java's strengths.On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Simon Brocklehurst wrote:True. Probably more of my reluctance is the relearning curve. But I oftenEwan Birney wrote:
my algorithms try to use all the memory of the machine, and if I start
running some extra overhead I wont be happy...
... but, yes, it is sheer laziness on my part with a shade of not wanting to learn something which then wont work...
Not sure how much memory you like to use in your software, so it might also be worth saying that writing Java programs that really use a *lot* of RAM (by a lot, I mean tens to hundreds of gigabytes) is at best going to be kinda cutting edge, and at worst might be completely impractical right now.
If you want to get up to speed with what current 64-bit JVMs are capable of in terms of performance with large heap sizes, there's a couple of articles at the URLs below to get started with:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/performance.guide.html
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Programming/turbo/
There might be really significant productivity benefits to be had from at least *protoyping*/*designing* new algorithms in Java. But to be convinced of this, you have to buy into the idea that Java really lets you focus more of your time on your problem (both design *and* implementation of solutions), and less on tracking down bugs and weird behaviours etc. This is not an easy benefit to quantify.
Qualitatively people who have had success programming in Java, seem to feel it's a really productive language. Personally, I can hardly bare to contemplate the idea of coding in C these days. To me, C feels restrictive compared to Java, in the way that FORTRAN felt restrictive after moving to C.
--
Dr Simon M. Brocklehurst, Ph.D.
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