Re:Microsoft's forthcoming Minecraft Education Edition is wr...
by ganeumann on Tuesday January 26, 2016 @01:18PM
(#10974883)
Yes, this is a good strategic move by Microsoft. All of my kids have Google apps accounts that their schools set up for them. They are required to use Google docs, etc., so they can work on stuff at school and at home. I assume that a good portion of those kids will continue to use Google apps as a default for a long time. Similar to a strategy Microsoft used to keep Office a standard: the dirt-cheap student version.
If Microsoft can get schools to use Office 365 instead of Google apps, then $2.5 billion for Minecraft was cheap.
I know this was meant to be a joke, but this was more an issue in wording by Schofield (the writer) than anything else. A Microsoft account is pretty much global across all their products. So it's also their email account, their OneDrive account, their Azure account... I'm assuming he picked Office 365 simply because that's the product he thinks is most likely to be already used in the school.
As for the optimization; the JIT's main optimization from what I've researched is inlining. Which is really beneficial for Java because you tend to end up with a nest of getter method calls all to get a single field somewhere, and wouldn't it be nice if the JIT could just inline that field for you? I suspect that, especially if performance is at stake, it's less typical to end up with patterns like that in a C++ codebase.