sun memo reveals java's bloat, puts it on a par with python

[John Roth]

This was discussed on Slashdot a couple of days ago.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/09/1347215&mode=thre
ad&tid=108
I'm not sure what the final consensus was, but there was
a strong feeling that it was a hoax.

There are a couple of rather obvious bloopers even in
the part quoted, such as the item about Python not
being a compiled language in the same sense as Java.

John Roth

"Wolfgang Lipp" <lipp at epost.de> wrote in message
news:c0f3952d.0302150858.3012eef0 at posting.google.com...
> the following snippet from an allegedly authentic memo,
> published on internalmemos.com, makes for a quite
> interesting read that provides an informed insiders´
> view on some of the biggest problems of java. of course,
> everybody on this list knows all of these points, but
> then, some executives don´t, yet. the quoted passage
> cites a study that diagnoses "a rough parity in
> performance" between java and python; in addition, it
> estimates python to be needing 1.6M for a "hello world"
> application, while java is at, roughly, 9M. well, if it´
> s only written to say "hello", then, probably, you could
> get away with a 0.8M python, i guess.
>
> (the study mentioned is available via
> http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/correct/312227 and
> http://www.ipd.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer2000.pdf; it
> has been listed on http://www.python.org/doc/Comparisons.html)
>
> memo.url =
"http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1321"
>
> memo.headers = """
>     Sun Microsystems
>     The Java Problem
>
>     The Java Problem
>     Author: Julian S. Taylor
>     Reviewed by: Steve Talley, Mark Carlson, Henry
>         Knapp, Willy (Waikwan) Hui, Eugene Krivopaltsev,
>         Peter Madany, Michael Boucher
>     """
>
> memo.quote[0] = """A study performed by an outside team
>     appears to indicate a rough parity in performance
>     between Java and a common implementation of another
>     OO language called Python (see IEEE Computing,
>     October 2000, "An Empirical Comparison of Seven
>     Programming Languages" by Lutz Prechelt of the
>     University of Karlsruhe). Both platforms are Object
>     Oriented, support web applications, serialization,
>     internet connections and native interfaces. The key
>     difference is that Python is a scripting language.
>     This means there is no compilation to byte code so
>     the Python runtime environment has to do two things
>     in addition to what the Java runtime environment
>     does. It has to perform syntax checks and it must
>     parse the ascii text provided by the programmer.
>     Both of those tasks are performed at compile time by
>     Java and so that capability does not have to be in
>     the JRE.
>
>     Given this data, it appears that the JRE can
>     actually be simpler than the Python RE since Java
>     does at least some of this work at compile time. The
>     example above of "Hello World" is a good method for
>     getting an idea of the minimum support code required
>     at runtime. This support code includes garbage
>     collector, byte code interpreter, exception
>     processor and the like. Hello World written in Java2
>     requires 9M for this most basic support
>     infrastructure. By comparison, this is slightly
>     larger than automountd on Solaris8. The Python
>     runtime required to execute Hello World is roughly
>     1.6M. """