Re: Generics are cool

Tim Tyler wrote:
>
> Lee Fesperman <firstsql@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote or quoted:
> > Tim Tyler wrote:
>
> > > IMO, autoboxing sucks.
> > >
> > > AFAICS, it's only good if your point of comparison is the previous version
> > > of Java.
> > >
> > > Take a slightly less myopic perspective - and surely the best thing is
> > > never to have had primitive types in the first place.
> >
> > I'd view that as a myopic perspective. Java wouldn't be appropriate for
> > certain high-performance applications if that were true. [...]
>
> That appears to be the idea that having no primitive types necessarily
> involves a performance hit.

True.

> Performance may have been one of the reasons why primitive types were
> included in Java in the first place - but I think these days the idea
> that having everything be an object involves a performance hit is
> regarded as a fallacy.

Do you have evidence of significant high performance applications written in such a
language?

> Essentially, a JIT should be capable of massaging a program into
> a functionally equivanent form, and whether things are objects
> or not internally becomes largely irrelevant at that stage.

Obviously, I have doubts that it is true in *all* cases. One area I mentioned was heavy
use of dynamic loading.

> Their design decision never got fixed - and now Java appears
> to be stuck forever with primitive types - and it's a factor
> that looks likely to be significantly implicated in Java's demise.

Ultimately, that may be true, but I don't think that is a widely held belief in relation
to a truly general purpose language.

--
Lee Fesperman, FFE Software, Inc. (http://www.firstsql.com)
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