[geeks] Browser licensing?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 03:38:33AM -0400, Alois Hammer wrote:

> I was referring to the instantiation of J2SE either as standalone or as
> a Firefox plugin on this machine.  Startup time is essentially
> identical, even though we'd certainly like the browser plugin to start
> as fast as possible.  Unfortunately, the plugin has to drag the rest of
> J2SE with it.  I assume that Sun has finally realized that
> Java-on-the-server is about as far as Java is likely to go for the
> foreseeable future, but I remember a long marketing slog where Sun
> wanted everyone running their apps off the Web and/or network, quite
> possibly through a browser.  It's reasonable to assume that they spent a
> fairly long time making the plugin as fast as possible until giving up--
> if they have given up, which I doubt.  They're still trying to make
> everyone use network terminals, and they've only been pushing that on
> and off for twenty or so years.

Would you call Flash slow to start up?  It also have a JIT VM.  I'm
fairly certain that it doesn't take seconds to start, however, I'm not
particularly willing to quit everything I have open to be able to find out.

Also, I can assure you that LLVM's JIT VM is not slow to start up.  On
my C2D 2.0ghz laptop (currently clocked down to 1ghz) it takes a
whopping 0.007s to start the JIT VM and execute a hello world program,
versus 0.002s for a machine code in elf version.