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New I seem to recall
complaints about Java being slow at one point.
New Re: I seem to recall
The prodigious throughput of modern hardware has rendered moot many (but not all) of the traditional performance differences between platforms such as Java and those which are natively compiled.

Certainly, Java is Fast Enough these days for most things.
New Yes but...
Perl is *SO MUCH* faster than Java on equivalent hardware with similar loads.

Heck, we use a Java Data Warehouse Reporting tool. It sucks.

We have made it into a "Presentation only" tool. We can do the same report data extraction with Perl and Shell on 6 year old hardware in 1/10th the time and passing fully populated short-term/temporary tables to the "tool" to render the "PDF" or "XLS" or what have you, than if the whole thing with was done almost brand new hardware withe the "tool".

Yes, its true, if you want faster clustered performance out of Java, just add more cores/processors and memory. But the point is, I can get nearly 90% more work done on older hardware not using Java.

No to mention, start-up loading times for Java *really* blow on new hardware. Worse than the time does for even the BIGGEST Perl programs we have on 6 year old hardware.

Its hard to believe that Intel and AMD doesn't praise Oracle (formerly Sun) for making Java such a pig!
New Re: Yes but...
Perl's a maintenance horror.

Java, less so.

If I save £20K on hardware but burn through an additional £50K in software maintenance (easily done), I'm £30K down; for all but the most performance-critical applications, no one upstairs is going to care that it's OMG FAST!!, they're just going to extract my gonads for overspending.

My experience is that, for a bespoke system with (say) a five year lifespan with software maintenance (not just bugfixes, but features and stuff) included, hardware is 10% or thereabouts of the total cost.
New We aren't experiencing...
Maintenance horrors. Its only because you can't find good Perl coders. Sucks to be you.

We write maintainable Perl. Even the stuff 10 years old is still easily maintainable, a bit archaic, but easy to maintain.

And you are talking different budgets and types of expenditures. Capital Expenditures are typically horribly hard to push through and justify. If you've got wetware already working... its easy to have them fix it.

Though, you don't have good (as in real ones not "think I am") Perl programmers.
New You are confusing two things:
Java the language vs. poorly written Java programs.

Straight out, Java is considerably faster than Perl. For maintenance, with similarly skilled developers, Java is better than Perl. Hell, Python is faster than Perl, and significantly easier to maintain as well.

For startup, well, Java isn't meant to be run as a short-run script like Perl. Startup time doesn't matter for anything other than a script that runs in an amount of time similar to startup time, after all. For batch processing, long-running server processes, and other such programs it simply doesn't matter.

Incidentally, if you're talking about Pentaho then yes, it really truly sucks. Don't use it. I'll add, however, that general reporting tools are usually slower than custom-built scripts. The former might not need a programmer involved, however, and the latter definitely does.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New And they're working on it
But again, financial companies are about conservatism and safety.

Incidentally, we have some Java code here that runs significantly faster than the exact same code in C++ (parser and expression language execution). Both implementations were written by people I consider to be extremely capable, and both have been tuned within an inch of their lives, but the Java is still faster.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New Now that is...
Effing unbelievable.

But coming from you Scott, on this kind of stuff, is significant!
New Re: Now that is...
Java optimizes the code that's running. C optimizes the code you're going to run. The difference can be significant.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New Damn straight
It optimizes with knowledge of data flow history and code path transversal. A few passes of data and it can rewrite your core hot spots. CPUs just got fast enough that this type of optimization is possible in real time and people don't get annoyed by the initial "sluggish" moment while the overhead of the optimizer tanks the system.
     Lisp or Smalltalk or something else? - (crazy) - (28)
         Dunno. But on the perl stuff... - (Another Scott) - (1)
             Oh, he schemed - (crazy)
         #2 == Squeak - (folkert)
         Re: Lisp or Smalltalk or something else? - (malraux)
         squeek is interesting but dunno how marketable - (boxley) - (23)
             Ruby and financial companies - (malraux) - (22)
                 they use the mq for messaging -NT - (boxley) - (21)
                     You mean Perl MQ? - (folkert) - (1)
                         no - (boxley)
                     Yeah, but Ruby? - (malraux) - (18)
                         slow vs faster dev time? -NT - (boxley) - (7)
                             Does it really matter? - (folkert) - (5)
                                 Nope - (malraux) - (3)
                                     Agreed - (crazy) - (2)
                                         I with I did know lithp. - (pwhysall)
                                         I've done LISP - (malraux)
                                 Depends on the industry - (drook)
                             Not in the financial world - (malraux)
                         I seem to recall - (S1mon_Jester) - (9)
                             Re: I seem to recall - (pwhysall) - (4)
                                 Yes but... - (folkert) - (3)
                                     Re: Yes but... - (pwhysall) - (1)
                                         We aren't experiencing... - (folkert)
                                     You are confusing two things: - (malraux)
                             And they're working on it - (malraux) - (3)
                                 Now that is... - (folkert) - (2)
                                     Re: Now that is... - (malraux) - (1)
                                         Damn straight - (crazy)

That's the kind of brilliant thinking that propelled you onto public access.
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