Why I Program in C++
- IBM’s Pervasive Computing Lab is an intelligent home with most electronic gadgets networked together. All but two gadgets run Java applications on Linux. IBM chose Java because “it’s a good way to insulate developers from the idiosyncracies of specific operating system deployments.”
- Luxor is a XUL toolkit with “a (sic) ultra-light weight, multi-threaded web server, a portal engine and Apache Velocity as its template engine.” XUL is an XML vocabulary for assembling GUI.
The examples cited above unsettled me as they came. A significant portion of the literature on embedded systems and RTOS is devoted to making the reader understand the constraints under which embedded systems operate, viz. low computation power and available memory. Computation power in embedded systems comes at a cost premium and in gadgets having high volume sales, every cent of the price matters. Here we have IBM using Java for their pilot embedded systems to insulate the developers from OS specifics. Note that all but two systems run Linux. You need not read voluminous books to realize that one of the goals of an interactive system is to respond to user inputs as fast as possible. It is interesting to know that people are developing XUL toolkits in Java. Seems like we’ve had too much of it for our own good.