Threads, inelegance, and Java
Quoted 3 lines · Russell Leighton
The lack of a good operating system _dependent_ interface
makes running fast hard in Java when you need to do IO...
yes, there is always JNI so you can add a little C to mmap a file or whatever,
JDK 1.4 beta comes with a way to memory-map files, and various other I/O improvements (like poll(); see http://www.jcp.org/jsr/detail/51.jsp).
Chris Smith will have some nio benchmarks up on http://www.jlinux.org/
next week or so showing how well their nonblocking network I/O performs.
Sun is slowly getting their act together on the I/O front with java. Still, the competition from C# and for that matter gcj will probably be a good thing, keep 'em on their toes.
(Disclaimer: I served on the JSR-51 expert group, representing the linux point of view, kinda.)
- Dan