Java 6 Available on OSX Thanks to Port of OpenJDK

LarsWestergren writes "Many Mac users have been upset that Apple has not made Java 6 available on the platform. Landon Fuller posts that there is a developer preview release available of Java JDK6 on Mac OSX, Tiger and Leopard. It is based on the BSD port of Sun's Java 6 and is made available under the Java Research License. Charles Nutter posts about impressive JRuby performance gains using Java 6 on his Mac."

Re:Maybe it's me

[Anonymous Coward]

The only Mac users I know that even noticed are Java developers.

What's the big deal about jruby?

[happyemoticon]

Am I the only one who thinks it's weird to run an interpreted language inside of a virtual machine? Would there be any application to it, aside from rewriting overly-verbose Java code in a more concise language?

Why Apple?

[Orange Crush]

Many Mac users have been upset that Apple has not made Java 6 available

Shouldn't they be upset at Sun? Why is Apple getting the flack?

Re:What's the big deal about jruby?

[Surt]

Why would anyone ever use anything but assembly? The rest is all syntactic sugar. Even if you need portability, you need only go as far as c.

More seriously, jruby is faster than cruby, and has nicer syntax than java. You would use it if you wanted to write code in a nice language on platforms where you would otherwise be stuck with java. Virtually anything that processes either plaintext or xml is going to be radically easier to implement in jruby than java, and nearly as fast at runtime.

Re:What's the big deal about jruby?

[Gr8Apes]

There's another reason to run JRuby - the ability to dynamically change a code snippet by users inside a larger application for custom rule engines, as an example.

Java allows it as well, but it's much harder to sandbox dynamically uploaded java code than a scriplet.

Who are these "many" Mac users?

[Logic Bomb]

Who are these "many" Mac users who are supposedly upset about Java 6? There were a couple of very loud-mouthed blog posts at the 10.5 release date, but other than that.... Java developers surely don't make up a group of "many" Mac users.

Java whiners

[revscat]

(Note: I am a Java developer by day.)

There was a huge, huge stink in the Java community when Leopard was released without Java6. Teeth were gnashed, complaints were shouted from the rooftops, great offense was taken. Threads of truly astonishing lengths [javalobby.org] were generated.

Watching all of this transpire made me incredibly embarrassed of the Java community. (Note: Predictable smart-ass comments can be inserted after the previous sentence.) The hue and cry was simply amazing and, let's face it, immature. "I want Java6 *now* and since it's not there I'm abandoning the Mac as my platform!" In other words: "I'm taking my toys and going home." Very, very few of the complaints were from people who actually depend upon Java6, i.e. are building apps with it. Instead, there was a large sense of entitlement that was unjustified and exhibitied a childish impatience that was amazing to watch, with a strong dose of the usual fanboy/hater streetfight.

*shrug* There were two choices that were much less reactionary: (a) wait for the Apple release Java6 or (b) work on the OpenJDK project. Kudos to Landon for doing this. It's a big start, and will hopefully generate enough interest to move it forward significantly.

Of course, people like to bitch, and neither of those choices fulfills that need.

Re:What's the big deal about jruby?

[ClassMyAss]

Yes, the JIT compiler is written in C, but you are wrong that a better optimizing C compiler could beat a really good JIT. The whole point of JIT is that it can use current information about how a program is running and do things like arrange objects in memory to increase the cache hit rate. The best C compiler in the world just doesn't have the amount of information available that it would need to do things like this.

That's not to say this all currently works in practice, though. Sun has been telling everyone for the past five years that the JVMs are so robust and intelligent that you don't need lightweight objects to do fast computation (for things like vector math), that you can just use plain old Java objects and the JVM will figure out how to optimize these, and anybody that's ever actually programmed some physics or graphics in Java knows that those claims are still crap. (Though I'm told this version of Java is much better about this stuff, to be fair)

However, failures in implementation aside, there are very good arguments that suggest that as we go forward, JIT compilers will eventually overtake statically compiled code when it comes to speed. IMO the current Java 6 JVM is a pretty good first step towards this ideal JIT compiler; maybe I'd qualify it as a very early alpha version of The Real Thing. Certainly much more of an improvement than the past few versions. It's unfortunate, however, that Sun continues to pretend that they've already got it all figured out and running smoothly, when there is obviously so much more work to do. It's also quite irksome that they ignore most performance-related RFEs, simply promising that the magical JIT will fix everything in the next version...

Re:Java whiners

[Knara]

You forgot 3) "switch to an operating system where your development tools aren't beholden to the whims of a single OS+Hardware vendor"

Re:What's the big deal about jruby?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice because if I wrote a program in C it would always be the same speed unless I upgraded the hardware. With Java the software just gets faster and faster with each version because the JVM gets smarter.

That's all well and good, but the C program started out faster to begin with. The Java programs may be getting faster, but the question is: are they getting faster than a program in C, or are they just approaching the speed that the C program had to begin with?

Re:Java whiners

[thomas.galvin]

Watching all of this transpire made me incredibly embarrassed of the Java community. (Note: Predictable smart-ass comments can be inserted after the previous sentence.) The hue and cry was simply amazing and, let's face it, immature. "I want Java6 *now* and since it's not there I'm abandoning the Mac as my platform!"

When I made the switch to Mac, one of the big selling points was Apple's clear statements that "Java was a first-class citizen," and "the Mac is the best Java development environment available." And for a long while, that was true.

Java 6 was released in 2006. Java 5 is from 2004. People aren't crying "we want Java 6 now," they're saying "we'd like your 'first-class' citizen to be updated to something written in the last three years." I don't think that this is unreasonable.

Re:What's the big deal about jruby?

[Paradise Pete]

No, you're definitely not the only one. What's so hard about learning Java instead?

I've been writing Java code since its early days, but I'd *much* rather write in Ruby. And JRuby brings access to all the Java libraries.

Re:Maybe it's me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a fast, good looking and responsive application, the last thing you would do is write it in Java.