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A comment on This is what happens when you let Java people write apps for your platform. Parent comment

Re:This is what happens when you let Java people write apps ... by bad_user on Friday April 09, 2010 @04:19AM (#1252203)
It hasn't been my experience, especially since the JVM's parameters need to be tweaked for it to accept that much memory ... the heap size is limited by default because the JVM doesn't release free memory to the operating system.

In practice the JVM does quite well on memory usage, its only flaw being that it doesn't release memory back. If your Eclipse instance ends up using 2 GB that's because it does lots of stuff and needs 2 GB of memory.

Either way, Eclipse is comparable in memory usage with Visual Studio, which has most of its components written in C++.

The only problem with using Java for desktop apps is with native integration with the OS ... Java GUI toolkits suck badly, except one which isn't really popular ... Qt Jambi.

But in the case of Android, this discussion is not really relevant ... they use their own VM that has different optimization goals (so any comparison to the JVM is apples vs oranges), and every component you use is native to Android.

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Re:This is what happens when you let Java people write apps ... by brazzy on Friday April 09, 2010 @09:01AM (#1252554)
the JVM doesn't release free memory to the operating system.

Not true. The Sun/Oracle JVM at least most definitely releases free memory. It's just rather reluctant to do so - but that, too, can be tweaked via the -XX:MinHeapFreeRatio and -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio parameters

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