Elysian Shadows

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... g-of-java/

I am sure you like some of the lines referring to its ability such as

"...software that has been finely tuned over the past fifteen years to run code at speed"

and

"Java is really the only choice when it comes to the requirements for a company like ours — extreme performance requirements..."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's important to realize that by "Java" they are referring to a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), not necessarily the Java programming language. In fact, it is possible to compile a whole slew of languages to Java byte code to execute on a JVM these days. C being among them. Using the JVM as a backbone for huge, scalable web applications is not something new, major websites have been doing it for years.

It's also worth noting that Sun (now Oracle)'s JVM is just one of many proprietary, commercial, and open source implementations of the JVM. Wiki has a large list here.

dandymcgee wrote:It's important to realize that by "Java" they are referring to a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), not necessarily the Java programming language. In fact, it is possible to compile a whole slew of languages to Java byte code to execute on a JVM these days. C being among them. Using the JVM as a backbone for huge, scalable web applications is not something new, major websites have been doing it for years.

It's also worth noting that Sun (now Oracle)'s JVM is just one of many proprietary, commercial, and open source implementations of the JVM. Wiki has a large list here.

In fact I believe Twitter uses Scala and Clojure, not Java-the-language.

Also, keep in mind that when they're talking about performance they're comparing to Ruby.

And trust me, the JIT managed C/++ equivalents for .NET and JAVA bytecode are extremely bastardized, obviously. You can't produce safe code with either language.