[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Development Strategies (the language thing)

[Brian Olson <locke@xxxxxxx>]

On Saturday, December 1, 2001, at 03:35  PM, Andrew Sutton wrote:

> i'm REALLY not a fan of java for performance critical applications. 
> it's fine
> for clients and web apps, but i just don't think a virtual machine can
> guarantee the performance of a native application. rewriting the server 
> in
> java would mean that all would be developers would have to learn java 
> and its
> subtelties in addition to the actual game.
It's gotten much better, as good as 1/2 C speed in some apps. VM vs 
Native, yeah, never perfect. Learning C++ (suggested below) is in my 
mind, probably harder than learning Java. They both have basic flow 
control and syntax of C. Java arrays might be the most different thing. 
C++ is a bristling WWII battleship of complexity.
> [snip] it [C++]
> also builds to native binaries and can take full advantage of a) other 
> c++
> toolkits b) the stl c) dynamically loaded libraries.
a) such as? (Qt?)
b) templates are verboten. much bloat if not careful. STL is specially 
bad because instantiating one of it's super general classes will 
probably create a bunch of unused code. STL is a valid tool for rapid 
development, not performance production code.
c) C can do that (os dependent, but C++ would be in the same position). 
Java does it really well.
[insert clever signoff here]
Brian Olson http://bolson.org/