Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

["Kevin Lawton" <kepla@btinternet.com>]

White Flame (aka David Holz) <whiteflame52@y.a.h.o.o.com> wrote:
| "Kevin Lawton" <kepla@btinternet.com> wrote in message
| news:bcplc6$b5e$4@titan.btinternet.com...
|| Cobol programmers respectively. The result is that the end-user, the
|| consumer, has to provide much bigger, faster and expensive hardware
|| at their own cost. The software might be cheaper to produce (though
|| looking at Micro$oft's prices you'd hardly think so !) but any
|| advantage gained is paid for dearly with the hardware required to
|| run it.
|
| ??? You can get new, complete, multi-GHz systems for only a couple of
| hundred dollars nowadays.  So while the requirements do go up,
| hardware costs are continually plummetting.

The 2 GHz system I built a few months ago cost about 600 pounds = 900
dollars. Given that 200 dollars = 130 pounds, we'd be lucky to get much
better than a used Pentium-II for that. Maybe a used sub-GHz Penium-III for
a little bit more.

|| As an example, I've tried writing the same programs in both C and
|| Java and then running them on representative machines.
|
| 1)  Did the JVM do JIT compiling?

Well, it's the standard Java downloaded of the Sun web site, so I hope so !
I have often expressed the opion that Java compiling is 'just too late' as
it waits till you want to execute it.

| 2)  Are you as proficient in what speed-conscious decisions must be
| made in Java to keep it fast as you are with keeping C code fast?

Maybe, maybe not. I've done the Sun Java certification course which only
made slight mention of performance issues. If there are any techniques you'd
like to point out which can make a 10-fold or even 100-fold difference, then
I'd be interested to know. I wouldn't have thought the term 'keep it fast'
was as appropriate to Java as maybe 'prevent it running terribly slowly'.