Re: Compare Swarm with Repast

[Gulyas Laszlo]

Hi,

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, Russell Standish wrote:

> Problems with Java.
>
> 1) Its slow

OK. Compared to, exactly what? It's much slower than
C, of course, but I am not sure about Objective-C (with
TCL/TK, JavaSwarm, etc.). Especially not on a Windows
computer that acutally has to emulate Unix to start it up.


> 2) Has too many incompatible versions

I don't understand this. I've been using Java since 1.0
and never had incompatibility issues. Also, I've been
using it on Solaris, Linux, Windows and OS X, but the
largest incompatibility was about the size of screen fonts...

> 3) Lacks operator overloading

This is the religious kind of problem, I think. I never liked
that in C++.

> 4) Lacks generic programming

True. But you'd probably need a rather large project to use that.
As far as I remember, it wasn't 101 in Objective-C either.

> 5) Lack multiple inheritance and polymorphism

It does have polymorphism. Not multiple inheritance, though.


Best,

Gulya


>
> (Personally, I don't care about the last point, as I don't use those features)
>
> WRT to 2), the last time I used Java was 2 years ago - its possible
> that this situation has imporved in the meantime.
>
> But the other 3 points are pretty significant.
>
> My usual development environment is C++. Its problems are:
>
> 1) Lack of garbage colection (Garbage collectors do exist for C++, so
> this is really a non-problem - more importantly defensive programming
> techniques exist to avoid memory problems)
>
> 2) Has too many incompatible versions - again within the last year,
> this problem has gone away with the widespread implementation of ANSI
> C++
>
> 3) Lack of object reflection - this is addressed within the Classdesc
> project, which had its first release at the beginnning of this year.
>
> 4) Lack of a decent ABM toolkit like Swarm. Ecolab partially fills
> this void, but more importantly within the Classdesc project, we're
> aiming at bridging the C++/Objective C divide to enable C++
> development of Swarm models.
>
>                                               Cheers
>
> Christopher J. Mackie wrote:
> >
> > I've never understood what Paul has against Java--what's not to like about
> > someone else taking out your garbage? :-)
> >
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> A/Prof Russell Standish                Director
> High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile)
> UNSW SYDNEY 2052                       Fax   9385 6965, 0425 253119 (")
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-- 
--
Laszlo Gulyas                           address@hidden
AI Laboratory                           http://www.sztaki.hu/~gulyas/
Computer and Automation Research Inst.  H-1111, Budapest, Kende u. 13-17.
Hungarian Academy of Sciences           * 36 1 209-6194

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   esp. using Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
   please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
   body of the message.
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