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Comment by xxs | Hacker News Reader

>>I do remember the MS JVM was significantly faster than Sun's.

This is not true, actually. JDK1.1 1997 had JIT. MS had basically exposed the Variant and COM, the windows handles and part of WinAPI. Overriding paint(Graphic) on a native AWT component (say java.awt.Button) did nothing either and so on.

>>Instead of improving the JVM, Sun decided to make money by suing MS. No wonder that bloated piece of slow crap that looks like crap is dying a slow death and stopped being relevant.

JDK1.3 with hotspot compiler (May, 2000) had the fastest JIT by far.

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From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine

> It was the fastest Windows-based implementation of a Java virtual machine for the first two years after its release.[1] Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, sued Microsoft in October 1997 for incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard.[2]

Which is the fastest JVM after 1997 is essentially a moot point after the lawsuit was filed.

I also like how Apple completely sidestepped such kinds of situations in iOS by disallowing third party SDKs and alternate browser engines. If there can be no Netscape or Java, there is no threat and no need to kill something and potentially get into trouble. Same with Google and Chromebooks.

You don't need a runtime environment on the client side to design a cross platform development toolkit. What happens with iOS is that 3rd party tools compile native iOS packages (kind of like cross compiling to target a platform different from the one you're developing in)

Such as Flash, which Apple did try to kill - remember the old section 3.3.1?

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flas...

The clause was removed just 5 months later; there were rumors that potential antitrust issues were involved:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/05/apples-compiler-policy-...

History repeats itself.

There's a few different solutions around. I believe one of them (https://trigger.io/) is even YC funded.

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