That’s all what you got? A desktop application without real use? The last time I use Tracker, it crashed. And that was only yesterday.

Want to see a sample of a real USEFUL desktop application developed in Java? Try JDiskReport. I wonder if Mono can beat that. By the way, JDiskReport isn’t that popular because it isn’t bundled with Gnome and it lacks marketing strategy (unlike Mono).

Shootout simply does not tune it, and I suspect the new G1 GC for Java7 and later versions of 6 will allocate less memory on startup. For the stuff Shootout runs, the JVM can probably be tuned to be far below what Mono uses.

I came to C# from after using C for over a decade, and Perl for half of one. I only casually looked at Java a decade ago, I didn’t come from it to C#.

After going to Java after C#, I find programming for Java very enjoyable and the base class API design seems very sensible.

I think APIs should make sense without needing to look through page after page after page of cryptically written documentation and then still not finding what you want.

Some features I wished to use didn’t even exist; for example, .Net did not gain concurrent lockfree collection APIs until .Net 4.0 (which is not out yet, only release candidates or whatnot), and Mono still does not have these. I needed one, and I ended up writing one. Java, however, does have everything I need there.

.Net also does not have a portable 3D HAL API. Microsoft tries to push XNA (the .Net wrapper for DirectX), but I can’t use it on Mono. The Mono XNA project is not part of Mono and seems to have stalled development 2 years ago; it never grew the 3D part of the API.

.Net does have two OpenGL wrappers, Tao and OpenTK (a fork of Tao). Tao examples would not execute on my AMD64 Linux system no matter how hard I tried, and OpenTK cannot be built by Mono, although it can be executed by it.

The OpenTK API has no documentation to cover how it differs from/improves on the C API that can be read on Linux, MonoDevelop does not support reading the embedded XML docs .Net languages use. Many times I had to read OpenTK’s source to understand what it was doing.

On the other hand, I switched to using OpenGL through Java, and LWJGL is a breeze to use and is well documented. LWJGL often tries to automate certain tasks (such as changing the common function argument style of “foo pointer, length of data behind that pointer” into a single “FooBuffer” argument) and makes development much faster.

I tried to comment on it (nicely, but pointing out its errors in fact and logic), but apparently the person moderating the comments is not accepting any more – no more comments have been added for quite a while.

SD has totally lost any credibility IMO.

The numbers are higher than they report for Java, all of these are computed interactively:

“C# programming” 63 million matches.
“Java Programming” 239 million matches.

So far this roughly corresponds to the reported numbers. But Java is both a language and a VM while C# is just a language. So running the query for “.NET programming” shows:

“.net programming” 682 million matches.

You can try those yourself at:

search.yahoo.com

The langpop stuff is fun, but I believe they need to include the “.net programming” on their results.

I’ve programmed in Java longer than I’ve programmed in C#, and I can say without a doubt that the C# class library is far superior to Java’s. C#, as a language, is also far superior to Java. The BCL was in no way ever designed to wrap or imitate the Win32 API and for you to claim as such is just a stunning display of ignorance or blind hatred on your part. If, after a month of using C# you were unable to wrap your head around it (especially coming from the java world), it is clearly a sign of incompetence on your part.

Perhaps you could elaborate with some substance.

Also, how is Java a “clear” minority? See LangPop… Java is almost as popular as C is, and other languages have a hard time coming close across all the metrics.

Java’s compelling advantage is that everyone uses it or supports it or everything has an API binding for it; it often comes pre-installed on OEM Windows installs (or gets installed with OOo), it comes pre-installed with OSX, and its very easily installed on Linux.

Java is everywhere, its the fastest usable language outside of C/C++, and I actually enjoy using it.

I have both Mono and Java installed, but I dont use either Mono or Java apps :> (but this is hardly surprising, I am a ruby diehard fanboi who is finally learning python. I prefer scripting languages ANY time over the code mess that is Mono/C# or Java)

In the end, Unix is C. “Fast” languages who need to dethrone C must focus on C as competitor, and not on C# or Java, because BOTH of these languages are a clear minority compared to C.

If you want a good language, you need to offer advantages for your users. And compelling advantages – not “just” that they are better than Java or C#.

Users, in the end, dont care much about which language is used, as long as the features they can use gives them some kind of advantage or feeling that their time isnt wasted.