The counter to that is that is that performance really matters in inner loops and in those cases the hot area is not that big, it doesn’t matter if your setup and tear down give up a lot of possible performance.

Early this year my son was playing chess which motivated me to write a chess program. I wrote one in Python really quickly that could challenge him. I was thinking of writing one I could bring to the chess club which would have had to have respected time control and with threads in Java this would have been a lot easier. I was able to get the inner loop to generate very little garbage in terms of move generation and search and evaluation with code that was only slightly stilted. To get decent play though I would have needed transposition table that were horribly slow using normal Java data structures but it could have been done off heap with something that would have looked nice on the outside but done it the way C would have done it in the inside.

I gave up because my son gave up on chess and started building and playing guitars in all his spare time.

Chess is a nice case of specialized programming where speed matters and it is branchy and not numeric.

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ofrzeta 2 days ago | parent [-]

I guess you could to now try some realtime audio processing. Surprisingly (to me) there are actuall existing realtime DSP packages for Java.

	▲	PaulHoule 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, audio DSP is not challenging which is what killed off the high-end soundcard. So far my collab with him has been over physics and electronics such as scaling for the prototype electric octobase (one string so far) that he made. His current stretch project is: he cut a MIDI keyboard in half and stacked the segments on top of each other like an organ keyboard and he's attaching that to two electric guitar necks. Probably the MIDI is going to go to a rack-mount MIDI synth so it's going to have one hell of a wire bundle coming out of it. Personally I am really fascinated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_synthesizer which can take the sound from an electric guitar or bass and turn it into MIDI events or the equivalent that controls a synthesizer. Most commercial versions have six independent pickups, they used to be connected to the brains with a ribbon cable but some of them now digitize on the guitar and send the data to the controller over a serial link https://www.boss.info/us/categories/guitar_synthesizers/seri...