Comment 8 for bug 889084

Hm, I don't think ZFS is a relevant comparison. It's a filesystem, and one basically intended for server use, anyway.

That Java is a pig for desktop apps is well known and self-evident. Among the ones I've used over the years are Azureus, NeverNote, CrashPlan, and others that I can't think of at the moment. And they are all slow to load and use much more memory than equivalent programs written in C (or even Python). They also hold on to memory that they no longer need, whereas otherwise it could release it (if properly written).

It might be ok for 8-core, 8 GB machines that are rarely rebooted--but there are a wide range of devices that such software needs to run on. Dropbox uses about 70 MB on my 2 GB netbook--and even that's pushing it. It's not practical for services that run all the time in the background to use hundreds of megs of memory. Pretty soon you don't have any left to run actual apps (including ever-growing hogs like Firefox).

Yes, yes: open-source, Free Software, freedom-to-fork, spare-time, show-us-the-code, patches-welcome, blah, blah, blah. I'm no newbie to FOSS--I've heard all this before. I'm just making a few points about why Java is not a good choice for this kind of project, and why it will hinder the project in the long run. Time will tell. Feel free to ignore everything I say. No offense intended.