C is fastest

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 02:57:38PM -0400, Yanni Chiu wrote:
> In the mid-80's Tektronics oscilloscopes were built using Smalltalk  
> running on a VM (i.e. bytecode interpreter). I'm not sure whether they  
> had custom garbage collection though. In any case, garbage collection  
> can be managed by controlling when it is invoked - by setting the policy  
> hooks, or by having the system initiate garbage collection at an  
> opportune time. Hardware resources were even more scarce back then, and  
> yet they found the trade-off worthwhile.

Smalltalk is its own weird thing.  I suspect most people working with
it are pretty good programmers to begin with.

> A Java VM is basically the same - a bytecode interpreter with garbage  
> collection. So if Java is failing to yield useful software, in your  
> experience, then it may indeed be due to the language itself encouraging  
> poor coding practice, since the VM technology is certainly up for the  
> challenge.

The VM may be similar, but the language being compiled into byte code
isn't.  Garbage in -> garbage out.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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