[bcrl]

Back in the mid 1990s I had a summer job porting a map engine from Visual Basic to a Java applet running inside of Netscape. It ended up being a performance optimization nightmare. Because $reasons, the database stored polygons as strings, and parsing strings in Java to get the coordinates needed to draw the polygons was ridiculously slow when doing it the Java way. I ended up having to write my own custom string parsing code to avoid all the overhead associated with object creation and garbage collection when using the Java string libraries to get barely passable performance drawing the simplest of maps. It probably didn't help that computers were still only running in the hundreds of MHz at the time, but that experience ended up souring me on Java for just about anything else.