What are the drawbacks of Java for seismologists?
At the moment Java is not as fast as native compiled FORTRAN, C or C++ for repeated, low level operations or for number crunching. Thus it may not be a good choice for high performance visualisation or for mathematically intensive codes. But this may change in the next few years as the Java interpreter-compilers on specific machines become more sophisticated in the use of hardware capabilities and in on-the-fly code optimisation. And already Java can make calls to native functions written in C, though this option looses platform independence. It is possible that Java will soon only be a poor choice for extremely CPU intensive number crunching. There is also a very large conceptual difference between procedural languages like FORTRAN and C and object-oriented languages like Java and C++. Java is an elegant, relatively simple and well thought out language, and can be learned rapidly. However, designing and producing truly object-oriented software is very difficult from working with “proc
