Re: [gentoo-java] sun java platform independence

[David Herron <David.Herron@Sun.COM>]

Java works fine on my Mac ... but you're right, and I know what you  
mean.

It's a matter of having appropriate VM's.  I suppose a pure  
interpreter VM (like what we call the "classic VM") could be portable  
to pretty much any system with just a recompile.  But it's from the  
classic VM that Java earned the slow reputation and we really don't  
want to go back there.  The Hotspot VM contains compiler(s) that  
dynamically compile the bytecodes to native code, so of course that's  
a big dependency on specific CPU's.

And beyond the VM, there's a bunch of other native code .. such as  
network I/O .. such as AWT, DnD, Sound ... Some of that is rather CPU  
independant.

It's certainly very possible that, in time, this process will result  
in a widely portable Java implementation.  Not tomorrow.  Not next  
week.  Not next month.  Our open sourcing process is ... well...   
it's going to take awhile ...

- David Herron


On May 18, 2006, at 8:53 PM, David Gurvich wrote:

> Will sun java finally become platform independent?  Java is  
> supposed to have
> been write once, run anywhere, but anyone using a platform other  
> than sparc
> or x86 knows that it's not..
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