"Martin Gregorie"  wrote

| > But that's not why Java was phased out. It was phased
| > out because it was bloated and unsafe and didn't belong in webpages.
| >
| You're right that it didn't belong in webpages but not about much else.
| Java was essentially a clean-sheet attempt to build something better than
| C++ and from the outset it was designed for the 'write once, run anywhere
| paradigm', which is why Java runs in the Java Virtual Machine - the
| language and compiled code is the same everywhere with all hardware-
| specific and OS-specific stuff kept where it belongs - in the JVM
|

  Yes. Except that it didn't really work. And it never belonged
in webpages. And it never belonged on the desktop. As I said,
it's used for in-house applets, just as .Net is. Neither of them
is well suited to desktop. What is? Compiled software.

  What I've been seeing as hack attempts to make cross-platform
software seems to be mostly Python. And some other packaged
kits for specific functionality. That's not really cross-platform.
Cross-platform is software written in versions that run to the
various platforms, targetting the platform API.

  I've never installed Java and never needed it. Nor do I want it.
Libre Office was requiring it at one point for some functionality
on Windows. Now I think they're doing that with Python. Which
explains why it takes 5 seconds for it to lumber into consciousness.
Python has become the new bloated crap to avoid writing actual
compiled software.

| Java is a lot more secure and crash-resistent simply because the compiler
| is designed to trap as many coding errors as possible before any compiled
| code is emitted. In addition insecure things like null-terminated strings
| and commonly misused things (untyped pointers, malloc and friends) are
| simply not exposed to coders and all objects are strongly typed, which
| gets rid of another heap of security issues. No preprocessors either.
|

   Great, but not for desktops. I don't have any software that
crashes. I find that's a very rare thing. But most Windows
software is still written in C++. Why not Java or .Net? Because
they're bloated, superfluous wrappers on top of the platform
API. Software doesn't need to have a bloated, superfluous
wrapper layer to avoid crashing. That's the whole point of an
OS being a platform.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05