Re: Relative Speeds of XSL Engines

[Ovidiu Predescu <ov...@cup.hp.com>]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2001 13:01:01 +0000, Sérgio Carvalho 
<sc...@criticalsoftware.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Feb 2001 10:57:30 +0100
> "Arnaud Vandyck" <ar...@ressource-toi.org> wrote:
> > 
> > I'm not sure I really understand these tests! I always hear "Java is slow"
> > and in these tests, Java XSLT Processor are sometimes faster than C++
> > parsers! Am I right? Did I miss something?.. or maybe missunderstand?
> 
> You just missed the last two years of developments on JIT compilers. Java is
> truly faster than C++ for most data manipulation tasks. I just whish Sun would
> speed up their implementation of Swing - the GUI toolkit. Too many people think
> Java is slow because the UI apps are slow, and it is all caused by a poor GUI
> toolkit (performance-wise).

IMO this is an overstatement. A similar data manipulation algorithm implemented
in Java cannot be faster than the equivalent one in C++. The two years of Java
development cannot overcome the 15+ years of C/C++ compilation optimizations.
The two language runtime and compilation models are very different and Java
cannot be faster than C++ for writing normal algorithms.

Now I agree with you that programs that can take advantage of the dynamic
binding in Java in a way that cannot be done in C++, could be faster when
written in Java.

Note that I'm not a fan of C++, on the contrary, I prefer more dynamic
languages like, Smalltalk, Objective-C and Java.

Regards,
-- 
Ovidiu Predescu <ov...@cup.hp.com>
http://orion.nsr.hp.com/ (inside HP's firewall only)
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