You young'uns who have only been using Macs for the past few months wouldn't remember when Java performance on our beloved platform was a little less than stellar. Actually, it was pretty bad. Okay, fine: the Mac platform was where Java applets came to die-- is that blunt enough for you? Heck, it was ages before we could even run any Java on our Macs, because the only real Virtual Machine out there was Netscape's, and it didn't come to the Mac version of the browser for a really long time. When it did, it was buggy as all get-out and slower than rush-hour traffic in the Land of the Sloth People. Ahhh, those were the days...

Of course, this was before we could use the JVM in the Mac version of Internet Explorer, and it was before Apple's own Mac OS Runtime for Java showed up. And needless to say, it was long before the advent of Mac OS X, which promised to be the very best platform for Java, bar none. We're not big Java fiends down here at the AtAT studios (note the distinction between java and Java-- we dig our coffee, but our Java use is basically limited to occasionally loading up a crossword applet), so we're not really qualified to judge whether or not Mac OS X's Java lives up to the hype, but Apple claims that it's "blazingly fast." We've heard from a few Java developers who have been disappointed by the performance of their software under Mac OS X, however, so we've long assumed that, while Mac Java may be better now than it's ever been before, Apple's marketing folks might still be sipping from the Fountain of Hyperbole.

But hey, maybe we've been wrong. According to an InfoWorld article, Sun, the company behind Java in the first place, is "considering including some Apple-written code" in its own Virtual Machine to introduce a little extra zing. Apple claims that it tweaked Sun's Java HotSpot VM under Mac OS X by-- and try to keep up, here-- "mapping [shared system libraries] into memory at run time" to "boost loading speed and reduce memory consumption." Consequently, Apple claims that "Java applications load faster on Apple Macintosh systems than on other computers."

Hey, we'll take Apple's word for it; if it were just more marketing fluff instead of a real technical improvement, we doubt the company would be offering to share its changes with Sun. And we're thrilled to hear that our platform is finally apparently hot stuff when it comes to Java, although we can't help but shed a tear of nostalgia for those grand old days when we played the original JavaBowl in Netscape 3 on a Quadra 800 at about twelve seconds per frame until the system crashed at most two minutes later. Actually, no, wait... that really sucked. Things are much better now. Never mind.