Paul Schlyter wrote:
You can do that today, with GigaBytes of RAM available. But doing it on an Apple II, with 48k (or less) RAM is a waste of memory resources.
Since you know what CPU your code is running on, nobody forces you to keep both routines in memory.
...of course "10 times slower" doesn't matter much with today's fast processors. That's why Java has succeeded while UCSD Pascal failed, even though they both built upon the same concept: portable binary code which was to be interpreted on the target hardware.
It depends on what you do. If you do lot's of graphics and sound stuff, Java is definitely a bad choice.