>>Especially after nobody (and this isn't only MS) managed to create a true Java compiler that created usable output that performed well.
>
>Can you explain this?!
>
>Vlad

Well, creating code that runs in a virtual machine on basically every platform is great for a lot of things, but really and truely, the compilation issue isn't all that big. In other words, if you could write code once and compile it for various target platforms without making any changes to the code, you'd get most of the cross platform issues, but in theory, you'd also get great performance (which is a great concern in today's Java world...).

For this reason, a lot of Java compiler providers (including, but not limited to MS) made efforts to create Java compiler. But as I understand it, the nature of the Java language isn't really compiler friendly. For this reason, compiled code isn't much faster than code that runs in the VM, but it is humongous. It's said, that all efforts do create a Java compiler were dropped after these setbacks.

Now, how much of that is true, is hard do judge for me. But there were a lot of proud Java undertakings such as "Corel Java Office". Now how many of those succeeded or even got shipped in the first place...?

Markus