Recorded at:

How The JVM Spec Came To Be

Presented by James Gosling on Oct 29, 2008

Community

Java

Topics

Language Design ,

Compilers

Tags

SmallTalk ,

Virtual Machines ,

JVM Language Summit ,

LISP ,

JVM

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   Good Presentation.

   Oct 26, 2008 2:27 AM by Ashwanth Fernando

   Thanks for the great presentation. Java changed the way the world thought about programming. Imagine the millions and millions of dollars in profit for businesses around the world that run on an open source platform. You are a true legend, James.

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   Re: Good Presentation.

   Oct 28, 2008 2:48 AM by Ashwanth Fernando

   There was a snippet in one of the slides that "Java generally beats C/C++ in performance".
   
   
   In the 3d gaming industry, those applications (games) tax the maximum out of the hardware and bring high end gaming hardware to its knees. Why is C++/VC++ the preferred programming language over Java? Is it because the DirectX/Open GL libraries are not well suited for Java, or are there inherent limitations in Java that does not allow it to beat C++ in sheer graphical performance.
   
   
   We have seen the gaming industry thought leaders such as John Carmack, regularly give their opinions about Java such as "Its a good way to make the gaming performance a tenth of what it should have been".
   
   
   I think probably a Java gaming edition (Am I coining a term here), should be created which has the OpenGL and DirectX compatibility and a VM tuned for maximum 3d performance in games. Programming will become a great deal easier as well for the thousands of game developers around the world. Imagine Crysis/Call of Duty 4/Unreal 3 running on a VM, that would be nice.
   
   
   Also imagine, just upgrading the VM version to have faster 3d performance (impossible in today's games, you need to upgrade the hardware).
   
   

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   Re: Good Presentation.

   Oct 28, 2008 7:35 AM by Tero Vaananen

   There is plenty of support for 3d game development in Java. See JMonkey Engine, for example. These generally use low level bindings to OpenGL via JOGL or similar.
   
   I am not an expert, but I think that the native bindings can be a bit slow and can tax the Java implementations. There are ways to reduce the interaction by batching the OpenGL operations, and have better performance, but clearly you can't get the same performance in this respect.
   
   Bytonic Software had a little demo of Quake running in Java, a couple of years back. If you look at the benchmarks it becomes clear that it is possible to run 3d games in Java with better performance than the original C version. This is not to say that the 3d engines in C/C++ have not since improved on this considerably.

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   Re: Good Presentation.

   Oct 28, 2008 10:11 AM by Ashwanth Fernando

   Thanks Tero for sharing your opinion. I do know that there are implementations of OpenGL and 3d engines in particular. Irrlicht is a popular 3d engine written in Java.
   
   Just that new games and the next generation titles are all developed in C++/Visual C++ and we have just benchmarked more than decade old games (talking about Quake) written in Java.
   
   The gaming industry is just not accepting Java as a game development platform, albeit for some applet and Swing games based on Java 2d.
   
   Sun should research on this and put in 3d graphics experts to bring out a version of Java that is highly tuned for 3d performance on the latest graphics cards and dual core processors.
   
   Just the idea of upgrading your VM and squeezing out more frames per second on current hardware excites me a lot.
   
   I think we have nailed the enterprise and the client side, I guess Sun can make a ton more money developing a JDK for game development and letting the hardware low level details such as handling a wide range of processors and graphics cards sink into the JVM, so that the game programmers can concentrate on higher order graphics eye candy effects and the AI for example.
   
   This might be totally a brand new research project and fun to develop, rather than taking open source implementations such as Xalan, Xerces,etc. and trying to fold them back into the mothership - Java and thus making the JVM and the JDK much bigger than it ever has been.
   
   I know there are lot of governance problems such as using the JCP to do this and probably we dont have gaming expertise in the JCP currently, but its certainly worth a try.

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   Impressed

   Oct 31, 2008 10:30 AM by Alan Williamson

   I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation, haven't seen James talk for a long time.
   
   One of the questions I would have asked; "knowing what you know today about all the applications that Java has been pushed to (server, embedded, plugins, mobile etc), if you could travel back in time and leave yourself a tip/note what would it be?"
   
   Also impressed at the UI here; love the fact the slides are changing in real time with video. Very slick.
   
   --
   alan
   alan.blog-city.com/

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