[computer-go] Language War!

[William M. Shubert]

On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 10:08 +0100, Dave Denholm wrote:
> Peter Drake <drake at lclark.edu> writes:
> 
> >> Have you considered GCJ? http://gcc.gnu.org/java/
> 
> > A possibility, although I'm concerned that GCJ only "supports most of
> > the 1.4 libraries plus some 1.5 additions". We use generics,
> > autoboxing, and enhanced for loops all over the place. (I know those
> > last two are bad for speed, so we've largely expunged them from the
> > core routines.)
> >
> 
> But perhaps it is a smaller job to convert from java 1.5 to a flavour
> of java that gcj understands. Since as you say, the latest java
> features tend to be slow anyway.

But, why would you want to move to GCJ in the first place?

All the benchmarks that I've seen (and admittedly, I haven't seen any
for a year or so) indicate that both IBM's JVM and Sun's JVM will
outperform GCJ. So unless GCJ has gotten much faster in the past year,
performancewise it is not good at all.

It also seems to be buggy. I get bug reports periodically from people
who are trying to run java software (either the GUI KGS client or the
GTP KGS client) in GCJ, and as soon as I tell them to remove GCJ from
their system and install Sun Java, the problems go away.