JTK wrote:
>
> Mark Anderson wrote:
> >
> > JTK wrote:
> > >
> > > But I do have to give Netscape credit for finally dropping the "Jazilla"
> > > concept. God, can you imagine?
> >
> > Actually, yeah. Java's a whole lot easier to design good renderers in
> > than C++.
> >
>
> Right, which is why they (and you) dropped it.
They dropped it because they thought it was too slow (almost four years
ago). Java has sped up since. We dropped it because none of us had
time with school and work (depending on the person) to actively develop
it. (And some of us had no expertise in renderer design; I still don't,
myself. I haven't taken a course on it yet.)
> > I say that as one of the former developers of Jazilla. Netscape
> > abandoned it long (read: years) before we did anything with it (and none
> > of the source is in common with the original Netscape project). We just
> > ran out of free time.
>
> Wait. I thought you just said it was *easier* to design a *good*
> renderer (I'm assuming HTML) in Java than in C++. Yet you "ran out of
> time" to do it *easier*?!?
Yeah. Renderers don't produce themselves. Zero time to do an easy task
is much less likely to produce something usable than lots of time to do
a difficult one. Those of us who knew how to design renderers didn't
have the time (like Andy Tripp and such), and those of us who did have
the time haven't had the background yet to do it (like Matthew Schmidt
and myself).
Java inherently doesn't suffer from code that's prone to leak. In
general, it's faster to develop code in Java (and if you use one of the
native compilers, you generally get the same output as a larger and more
buggy C++ program).
But again, off the topic. Java is good for some tasks (like writing
renderers, for the very same reason it has become the language of choice
for many server-side applications), and not good for others (like GUI
performance, currently). It's a tool like any other.
