When is last time you do unions, bitwise variables, destructors, multiple inheritance? And the crown-jewel is Garbage Collector, a phone cannot just go about rebooting in the middle of the day just because some guy forgot to dealloc() or delete heap. Now JIT, it did offer good speed; the only problem I can see is that VNC needs Native not Dalvik. Sun Micro did not say ‘OK, we need a carbon copy of Visual Basic with a more popular syntax’, they had to design entire VM to compete and wreck their hardware line up.

You should be properly armed with information before you bash it for being no good it sounded no more like OS war or browser war redux. Just GC along renders the original article quite meaningless. You can say to adopt Microsoft’s early ’90s approach of Runtime but back to unmanaged approach of C/C++ is very bad idea.

Java worshipers, that’s where i have issues with. I can’t stand them.

I think Google chooses Java because the influx of Java developers out there, simplicity, and rapid development. All that to counter the climbing number of iOS developers. But doing so at the cost of alienating non java developers.

Same thing happens to the Windows Phone 7 now, with their lack of support for native code.

People likes to think Java performs as good as C. But the fact is, that even C compilers are still not as good given the many new processor specific instructions not being used efficiently. So, how can that VM possibly be as good?

And some of you ranting about layers of layers bla.. sure, but in C or C++ you have the freedom to use the Assembly language, and processor specific codes as needed. That will give us the edge.

See this guys post if you don’t believe me http://www.shervinemami.info/armAssembly.html

Also, i’m about to enter the Android market as a developer. Best thing i could do is using QT (Necessitas).

For those saying Java is as fast as C++ or C give me just one, just one application written in Java that is as fast or even faster than their counterpart. What good is line by line comparison. People use application and not loops or any other benchmark test.

I don’t like the iPhone, but compare the Applications there against any one developed for Android.
One good example is this app for musician that being co-developed by Jordan Rudess http://samplewiz.com/
It was developed for the iPhone and iPad, but they are also painfully try to release an Android version, check their FAQ. http://samplewiz.com/faq.html

Oh, and some of the QT sample game applications ran very smoothly on top of Android, even if they only used software rendering. Pretty impressive don’t you think?

From the Android NDK site:
“The Android NDK is a companion tool to the Android SDK that lets you build performance-critical portions of your apps in native code.”

What does that tell us?

Now I own a company with a popular app, and the performance between iOS and android is a scandal. The slower 3GS is smoother than an xperia arc. How come?

Android is mature now, and it is obvious that it was a bad choice.
Making the life easier for developers, but badder for the user.

The only one too blame is the jvm, no matter java sheepskin like to twist and turn it.

I am seriously disappointed about the evolution of things, with a 486 dx4 you could more amazings things than with android now. A simple app with 2 forms scroll jerky but at least they consume 3 mega of ram. Great

Java runs as native code. The compilation just happens to be done later (JIT). AOT compilers exist for Java, just like C++. Not worth while though.

Java 6 is much easier to use than Java from 90s. If that is not enough, use Scala. It works seamlessly on JVM, performs about the same as Java, has adequate tooling and is *highly* expressive, far exceeding C++. It works on Android. Java can be as simple or as complicated as you would want.

The only place where Java falls short to C++ in general use (not including very low level apps that need bit flipping) is in memory use. This has to do with the fact that it is a garbage collected language. For a garbage collected language, Java performs quite well.

Screw Java!

Android is still good. Interpreted Java (like all interpreted languages) is awful, and you can feel the sluggishness it imparts to an Android device, but this sluggishness isn’t too bad on faster phones, and most apps aren’t time-critical. But that’s not the reason that Android is still good. Android 2.2 will have just-in-time compilation, which means Java bytecodes will be translated into native code. That should give a massive speed boost, but that’s still not the reason that Android is still good.

The reason that android is still good is that NATIVE code is supported. No other phones I know of allow this. Many Android apps (such as the Android SNES emulator I like to play) are written in native ARM assembly language using the Android NDK (look it up). True, Java is the main API, where most of the features live, but it’s not the only API Google has made available on the platform, and that seems like a key detail that this article fails to mention.

This article makes it sound like you have to write every function in your Android app in Java whether you want to or not, and that’s patently false.

from the so many new and better language
Google had to choose JAVA.
a slow, bloated, outdated, useless language out from the 90

Java and their apps should be in a museum
next to the Borland Turbo C/C++
Well at least you can use the old Borland C++
to teach kids programming

What earthly benefit do you get with the following layers?
OS as an abstraction on the hardware, then Java(the JVM) as another abstraction on the OS and finally “your” apps accessing the Java layer (if you call that as an abstraction). It’s like asking your “message” recipient to go check her voice mail to check her email to check whether she received the postal mail that was sent last week.

marco

The only real advantage of Java is that it’s a high level sand-boxed programming language. The idiot who once kept allocating memory and did not free it, the guy who kept having buffer overruns without realizing it, the guy who didn’t know how to properly allocate/deallocate a linked list is now a competent programmer thanks to Java. Java does all the nitty-gritty programming for you. You no longer need to understand how pointers work, you no longer need to understand program flow, you no longer need to worry about creating garbage out of the system’s memory because not only Java does all that for you, but it also ties your hands behind your back so you can’t fudge with it even if you wanted to. That’s awesome for idiot programmers who continually used their hands to fudge things up, but it really sucks for programmers who liked having control. It really really sucks more because Java reduces all programmers to the level of the idiot programmer, and wastes CPU cycles continually cleaning up after the idiot programmer (which is now everybody!)

Regardless of how you try to put it: running a program in an emulated virtual machine is not dignified, it’s slow and clunky, and leaves a lot to be desired.

Whoever thinks it’s “portable” and cross platform please bring me an Android app running on a different machine with a different OS without having to recompile anything. It’s no more “portable” than C. It’s no more portable than an NES program designed to run on a NES but can be run in any platform with the proper NES Emulators Java is no different of a concept.

At least with C the program is compiled into native binary that runs on the specific hardware without an emulator layer. Java’s emulator emulating native code out of Java code wastes way too many CPU cycles. I can see this very easily when I just modify my C program that ran very fast on a 33MHz 486SX, and it runs much slower on the G1 which supposedly has much faster hardware! The extra CPU cycles are spent translating Java code into native code during run time. What a waste. Whoever thinks Java isn’t slow and clunky doesn’t know anything about low level programming.

Luckily, Android NDK allows parts of the program to be written in C compiled into Native code. The code still has to interface with the main part of the program written in Java, but at least now you can write some native code for Android…. but good luck trying to install the NDK, there’s very little documentation on the NDK.

native c/c++ apps are not THAT hard to port, especially seing as ARM is becoming standard for phones etc.

So you’re wrong. Proven. :)

When I think of Java, I think of write-once, slow everywhere. Don’t even get me started on the nuances of vendor support for the different VMs.