[Crito]

I don't understand how you believe that I was implying that nobody develops cross platform software.

I am talking about one specific kind of development: Service/backend development done in-house in a corporation that is not a software vendor. If you're doing Swing/OpenGL work, you're not doing the sort of work that I am talking about.

In my experience, while this sort of development may deploy to different nix's at different companies, within any particular company it tends to always deploy on only type of system. Most "mega-corps" are not software vendors; when they develop software they are developing it for themselves. This means that they control the entire stack, making portability fairly pointless.

When development in these organizations is done in other languages without such a "portability culture", not a second of thought is given to portability. The second a service is written in Java though, everyone starts jumping through hoops for something that they will never use.

[smikhanov]

Portability of Java helps you avoid the situation when your sysadmin tells you that he just upgraded a production server because the previous version of your distro reached its EOL and now your product does not start because libfoobar.so that you depend on is not included in the distro any more and he can't build it from source because the distro's default compiler also switched from gcc to clang.

Portability is important, even when you supposedly know your deployment platform.