[sword-devel] Re: sword-devel Digest, Vol 19, Issue 30

[Chris Umphress]

On 11/1/05, DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>>  Perhaps not everyone uses Java ;-)
>
>  So true. However, Java's resource bundle can be thought of as a design
> pattern. Its basic design is worthy of consideration for any language. C++
> does not support internationalization or localization. It is an afterthought
> at best. However, this is part of the design of Java from the start. I have
> implemented most of this design in Perl.
>
>  The only advantage that I see in implementing ResourceBundles for C++ is
> that the same files can be used by both Java and C++. I bet that there is
> C++ code out there that can use Java ResourceBundles.

Understood, all of the string functions are designed for ASCII, rather
than UTF-8. VS 6 and earlier were the same way. It was a fairly
universal problem. .NET (and Windows 2k+) handle it a lot better.

>>  C/C++ still requires significantly fewer resources, and is more widely
>> used from what I have seen. Java is more portable, and is a big hit in
>> colleges right now, but also requires more resources and a slightly
>> faster processor to achieve the same speed.
>
>  I beg to differ on the speed issue. At my previous company, we took a C
> program that was taking 4 hours to run and re-wrote it in Java. The end
> result was that it took 1 hour to run on the same hardware. We then moved it
> from a Sun 4-way multi-processor with gobs of memory to a single cpu desktop
> and the time dropped to 1/2 hour.
>
>  I rewrote a C++ program into Perl and went from 24+ hours worst case to 1
> hour worst case and from 2 hours normal case to 1/2 hour normal case. The
> memory footprint was 1/10 in Perl. Again, on the same hardware.
>
>  In both cases the difference was that the programs were re-written to take
> advantage of the language's architecture and strengths. And of course, the
> pitfalls of the earlier designs were avoided.
>
>  IMHO, it is usually dumb to port from one language to another. It is better
> to re-write to a better design.

haha, that's what I was thinking. Somebody messed up big when writing
those programs in C/C++. I love scripting in Perl, but it always has
the overhead of having the interpreter. They do a good job of
minimizing that, but it is still there. Java is similar in the respect
of having a little bit of an overhead also.

Programs written in Java have left a bad taste in my mouth. Several
programs I have tried out require the better part of 50 MB of memory
just to run, which was a bit excessive for the tasks (IMO). On the
other hand, I know that programs written for my phone were
well-optimized. I'm not saying that Java don't have its purposes, but
I wouldn't use it for everything.

Now I hope you understand my comment a little more :-)

--
Chris Umphress <http://daga.dyndns.org/>