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by pvg
3553 days ago
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Deployment (and fever dreams of 'mobile code'). It's also worth remembering that Java was designed and implemented at a time when the landscape was significantly less x86-centric and Sun was one of the companies on the not-x86 side. |
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Java is old. It's seen a lot of CPU architectures come and go over the years. When it started out x86, SPARC and POWER, were important. Then it saw a mass migration from x86 to amd64 on the desktop and server side, and an explosion in the importance of ARM in mobiles (several flavours).
Along the way it's seen lots of smaller proprietary architectures come and go too, like the exotic DSP-oriented processors found in BluRay players and pre-smartphone phones and like the Azul Vega architecture that was specifically designed for executing business Java.
And don't forget that even amd64 is not a homogenous architecture. It adds new CPU instructions pretty regularly and thus can be seen as a long line of compatible but different CPU architectures. Java apps transparently get support for all of them on the fly, without having to recompile the world. You see the benefit when you realise the size of Maven Central ... there are JARs out there that are still useful and good even a decade after they were compiled, yet they still get optimised to full speed using the latest CPU instructions no matter what kind of computer you use.