Sinful Desires

Java is widely held as the Holy Grail of cross-platform programming. Unfortunately, for as long as that has been true, it has also been akin to the Holy Grail to the Order of Fast Moving Garden Snails.

Lately though, I’ve begun to realise that its mostly a combination of two things:

• Sucky GUI architecture in Java itself (AWT/Swing) compounded by sucky understanding by those who actually use it — that whole event handler thread issue…
• Actual usage of the JVM to run applications — why not GCJ?

Let us review the above two points now, but in the context of the Java-Gnome project. Java-Gnome not only eliminates the GUI architecture of Java from the picture, but it also allows the use of the GCJ compiler to produce native code for the target platform.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this then eliminate the two reasons that most people (Jorge, Dweeb) don’t want Java in Gnome? Speed and good looks are no longer concerns.