[Melbourne-pm] Dancing around the event horizon

[Toby Corkindale]

Hi Dean,
Of course, you can write poorly-performing code in any language, Perl included. I'd go so far as to say that Perl even encourages it, by making it easy for developers to do awful things such as grabbing the result of shelling out and running another command.

But if you're comparing well-written code in Perl with well-written code executing on an appropriate* JVMs, then the JVM will win, hands down, every time.

I say "appropriate* JVM" because there are quite a few different jvm engines around by now; some of them designed to be lightweight, fast-startup, memory-efficient affairs, and some designed to be highly-tunable and as fast as possible for longer-running processes. If you want to make the jvm look bad, it's easy to select an engine that's tuned against your benchmark needs.

I think you overstate differences between the major vendors; and Java has been pretty good about maintaining backwards compatibility. Care to state any examples?
Meanwhile, it's not like Perl has a stellar track record there either.

Toby

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dean Hamstead" <dean at fragfest.com.au>
> To: melbourne-pm at pm.org
> Sent: Thursday, 4 June, 2015 2:02:17 AM
> Subject: Re: [Melbourne-pm] Dancing around the event horizon
> 
> Developing in java is, in my opinion, a huge liability.
> 
> Nothing to do with the language itself, just that you have to deal with
> issues between openjdk, oracle and potentially ibm's java. If you pick one,
> whatever version you are on will soon be out of date and broken in new
> versions.
> 
> I also wouldnt associate the word "performance" with java. Sure, you can
> write performant code (as you can in any language) - ive just not seen it
> that often.