Quote Originally Posted by Mes Tarrant View Post
But it IS free for me! I'll get free software once I've used up the two times with these.
I was referring to free software, not freeware. Check the link if you want to learn the ideological distinction.

Quote Originally Posted by Ynot View Post
with that in mind, as far as I know java is no slower (in theory) than any other language
Correct, but not wholly for the reasons you state below. As I see it, it's more that Sun Microsystem's implementation (the Java Runtime Environment), being a virtual machine / JIT compiler, executes bytecode more slowly than an OS executing machine code. Third party ahead-of-time compilers like the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) yield precompiled binaries whose performance should be on par with languages like C++. However, Java's automatic garbage collection is part of the language specification rather than Sun's implementation, so even compiled Java software might still underperform C++.

Quote Originally Posted by Ynot View Post
I have it on good authority that the apparent "slowness" of frontend Java apps, is down to poor use of the GUI toolkits

In the GUI event handlers, you are supposed to fork off all business logic, so that the GUI is in one thread, and the core donkey work is done in another
but many java people lump any and all code directly into the event handlers
this means, when it's compiled (or JIT compiled (Jitted?), or whatever it is you call it) everything ends up being plonked into a single thread
Most graphical Java applications use Swing/AWT or SWT, which to my knowledge only work with Sun Microsystem's implementation of Java. Therefore, all the performance disadvantages of the VM/JIT system apply. Both toolkits tend to perform poorly and hog resources regardless of the code's design. That being said, there are a (very) few Java applications that manage to sport a responsive GUI. Art of Illusion comes to mind. According to a Google search, it uses the Buoy GUI toolkit. Maybe that's worth looking into.