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SubjectRe: ActiveWhy (was Re: Comments on Microsoft Open Source document)
On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, Kevin Grey wrote:

> I thought the problem with creating crossplatform apps was with the actual
> porting of the program... Isn't activeX only PC win? Plus compiling such
> an app would still be an enourmously long amount of time relative to java
> loading and execution.

Compiling will be necessary only once when applet/control/whatever is
loaded. And I suspect that most of such things will be near trivial --
note that standardized library that should be used to make
the thing cross-platform, will be already there, and most likely the
transfer time for code and especially data will be longer than compile
time on any reasonably fast processor.

Java however in all of its forms runs slow because: 1. Java VM is slow
and buggy, 2. JIT compiler does not exist for a lot of platforms (I have
never seen reliable JIT compiler for Linux). I can't see any benefit in
Java unless someone needs a solution to do something that works on a lot
of platforms and refuses to send the source code for compilation on
platforms other than his own. While Java's original idea was different, it
seems now that it all degenerated into "how to keep our programmers
from using MFC in Windows, so things will kinda work on Solaris with
Motif, too, and then avoid sending the source to the nearest guy with
Linux box to type make".

> The best solution (I think) is to have Java
> compiled machine code when speed is an absolute necessity. Then selecting
> the program specific to your platform would be nice, although there is
> absolutely no security features with such a situation because all the
> security features of java are imbedded in the interpreter. Plus you would
> never know whether the app was truely coded in Java and not C or some
> other language. Still it would be nice to compile java byte-code into
> machine code. I remember seeing some GNU util that dumps ASM... but not a
> fullscale compiler yet.

It may be a good idea to allow binary download/execution if fuch thing
is available, however it must be optional -- without source it will leave
a lot of platforms unsupported, and if one needs an example, please look
what happened with Quake when Quake II switched the support for its
modifications from interpreter to compiled shared libraries (and, as
opposed to ActiveX, it's possible to compile them for Linux -- just
people didn't do that, and I suspect that few of them kept the code
portable).

--
Alex


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