> Per-pass performance gets worse. Overall performance gets better, because fewer passes need to be made.
Yes, but what the users will see is that, instead of his application occasionally "feeling funny" every five minutes or so, the application will visibly lock every ten minutes.
It's a hard lesson that Java learned a long time ago: it's ok to be reasonably fast all that time, but people will immediately begin yelling if you're fast most of the time, but suddenly you get really sluggish, even if just for a few seconds.
Which is to a large extent why Java GUIs were essentially a failure, but it still has a large niche in high-performance server apps; you can usually get away with >100ms pauses there.
Well, it was an enterprise language, and quite often most of the flaws you'd get in Java GUIs were there in the previous, native versions, too. Just like they're still there in the intranet web apps that replaced a few of the Java clients.
(I know a few people who still prefer the old-fashioned mainframe terminal apps, if available. If all you have is a few colors and line-drawing characters, even programmers have a hard time messing up simple forms. Not saying that we/they don't often succeed despite this difficulty...)
Nah, the lesson I was thinking about was taught earlier, in the days of AWT. Back then, Java was fairly slow, and the garbage collector was not as sophisticated as today. When the GC started collecting, you knew.
