Charles O Nutter wrote:
> I'll lob a couple of grenades and then duck for cover.
> 
> - Write it in C is as valid as write it in Java (as someone else 
> mentioned).

Not really.  In C you can quite easily use inline assembly
to do use your chips MMX/SSE/VIS/AltiVec extensions and if
you need more, interface to your GPU if you want to use it
as a coprocessor.

I don't know of any good way of doing those in Java except
by writing native extensions in C or directly with an assembler.

Last I played with Java it didn't have a working cross-platform
mmap, and if that's still true, the awesome NArray+mmap Ruby
floating around is a good real-world example of this flexibility.