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A comment on A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5. Parent comment

Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by personZ on Monday April 14, 2014 @10:59AM (#7586512)
This benchmark is a bit artificial (though still interesting and illuminating), given that much of what we do on our smartphone is not so computationally intensive in our own code, but instead most apps are a relatively thin layer of glue and duct tape that coordinates and orchestrates the underlying native platform code.

The choice of Java/Dalvik does seem like a mistake, and was a carry-over of Android coming from classic J2ME roots, which worked well with Google's love of all things Java.

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Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by mdwrigh2 on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:31AM (#7590580)
>The choice of Java/Dalvik does seem like a mistake, and was a carry-over of Android coming from classic J2ME roots, which worked well with Google's love of all things Java.

Where did you get the idea that Android had J2ME roots? It definitely did not.

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Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by pjmlp on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @04:06AM (#7590827)
At least they had planned J2ME support as well.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-origi...

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Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by mdwrigh2 on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @11:33AM (#7592339)
Through a compatibility mode. The platform itself was specifically not J2ME.
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Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by personZ on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @09:38AM (#7591699)
Rubin came from Danger, which was a J2ME company. They started Android (pre-Google) as yet another J2ME company. When they were eventually acquired by Google, Google didn't want to play ball with Sun, so they went with a clean-room simile, but, to consult actual Google documentation (three years after Android was started)-

http://www.scribd.com/doc/217988654/13/Boot-Loader

the Platform will be compatible with Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME).

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Re:A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5 by mdwrigh2 on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @11:48AM (#7592432)
But they didn't intend to build a J2ME platform, but rather a shim for J2ME apps via some compatibility mode. From some of the original Google documentation:

> "Leverage Java for its existing base of developers. Build a useful app framework (not J2ME). Support J2ME apps in compatibility mode. Provide an opTMobileized JVM (Dalvik)," one slide reads.

I think there's a pretty big difference between building a platform on top of something, and planning to support it via a shim layer. At that point Android was already planning on breaking from J2ME by supporting things like JNI (which is listed on that doc but is explicitly not included in a conforming CLDC implementation for security reasons).

Besides, the only microedition APIs that are in the platform are a few khronos libs, so I really don't think any of that thought really affected Android as we know it today (which was the parents original argument). I will give you that there's more JavaME heritage than I thought, but it was thrown out pretty quickly as far as I can tell.

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