→ Duncan's Journal: Android VM Performance is not a Factor
A faster VM will certainly help things out. But Android’s eventual fate will have little to do with how fast the VM is or how long method dispatches take on the iPhone. Instead, it’ll have to do with harder things like user experience, service plans, interoperability, and excellent applications.
A lot of developers - and tech folks in general - seem to be so obsessed with benchmarks and raw, measurable execution speed: ‘The new Android OS will be faster than the iPhone’, ‘How fast does this piece of code run compared to this one?’, ‘The new version is much faster.’, ‘Ruby is slow!’, etc., etc.
Do these people actually choose their platforms/gadgets like this, without also looking at other not-so-easily-benchmarked factors? I don’t know. But I believe the whole ‘speed’ discussion is way overrated.
Bonus: I wrote this on my almost 6 year old PowerBook G4. ;-)
Now go, read the article.
