On 16/10/2010, at 10:35 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Also, it's news to me that Java finds heavy use anywhere yet. (Then again, if they run Java server-side, how would you tell?)
Java seems to be used heavily for developing mobile phone applications (other than iPhone, of course). My young daughters have el-cheapo phones (< NZD 100), but even they run Java. Android even has its own Java VM called Dalvik, which doesn't use Sun's byte codes. There are alleged to be nine million Java developers (whatever that means, don't ask _me_, ask Oracle).
It seems to me that most operating systems are designed with the assumption that all the code being executed will be C or C++ with manual memory management.
You have to use Objective C for the iPhone. Recent versions of Objective C support garbage collection. For that matter, Sun shipped a conservative garbage collector with Solaris for years; look for 'libgc'.