Java this year?

[Jon Stratis]

We're up in the air about it currently... the students have a class at school that is taught in Java, so that would make the most sense... however depending on what we want to do for the game we may decide to stick with C++ for the performance boost. Lets just say i've had a few bad experiences with Java performance since i started programming. Actually come to think about it... they didn't even have Java back then!

My gut tells me that a lot of teams will use Java, due to the simple fact that most comp sci programs these days place a heavy emphasis on it. Using it on the robotics team goes well with programming classes schools run, and it can serve as a good introduction before college. Plus, some of the more complicated things (like memory allocation, if you're getting really complicated) are generally easier with Java. But one thing everyone has to keep in mind - Java is a runtime language, while C++ is a compile time language. That means C++ is optimized for your device when you compile it, while Java incurs a performance overhead from the virtual environment. They've made huge strides in minimizing this overhead, but it is still there.