[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: On2 Codec

[Colin Ward]

gabor wrote:
> 

   [Snip]

> (and here i am, picking a java-fight on the ffmpeg list. again ;)
> 
> 1.
> i don't really understand why is it a PROBLEM, that there are multiple
> implementations. shouldn't that be an adventage? i left the c/c++ world
> a long time ago, but last time i checked, the various compiler vendors
> provided their own stl/stdio/whatever libraries. how is that different
> from the java situation?

   Because the different Java implementations behave differently so your 
program behaves differently (sometimes completely breaking) on different 
VMs.

> 2. 
> or you can require the sun jvm. well, you can choose to support only the
> sun jvm. if someone uses the ibm jvm with it, he can, but the only
> supported one is the sun jvm.

   We are talking about the mobile phone world here.  The VM is written 
by the phone manufacturer (or sometimes licensed from someone) and is in 
the ROM of the phone, so you don't have any choice about what you use. 
And they all act differently.  Here is a classic example:

   I wrote a small program that calls Connector.open() (Connector is a 
simple socket class that comes with J2ME).  On my Sony Ericsson device 
it returns immediately and you can start reading data as it comes in on 
the socket.  On my Nokia device it reads the entire file that you have 
remotely opened *before* returning.  This might take several minutes to 
complete if it is a large file.  So if you are trying to write an 
audio/video streaming application (as I am) then you can forget it with 
this implementation.  And the crazy thing is that because the behaviour 
of open() is not specified in the API documentation, both 
implementations are legal with respect to the specification, and yet one 
is unusable.

   And it's like this with all sorts of methods.  Did you know that when 
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell was released for J2ME mobile phones they had 
to release *600* separate versions of it, to cope with the differences 
between the phones and their VMs?  And people *still* hype Java as this 
cross platform solution.  Crazy.

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