The JVM implementation for the Mac has serious technical issues for any sophisticated program. Its use of cooperative threads, for example, means that a program using many threads (like LimeWire) can exhibit serious performance limitations. Multithreading is, however, a cornerstone of modern programming, and should be supported in a robust manner.

LimeWire is an extremely well architected and robust program. We program to the API, as any good program should do, and Apple's Java API is Sun's API. They do not maintain an API of their own for, they simply use Sun's.

With all due respect to Gary, LimeWire is not a Windows program that was ported to the Mac. LimeWire is a Java program written to the Java API.

While we admittedly have not had the resources to devote as much effort to the Mac version of LimeWire as we would like, please be aware that we have not had similar problems with JVMs on any other platform. LimeWire performs well on Linux, Solaris, other Unix varieties, and even OS2. It also performs quite well on OSX. Mac OS 9.1 and below is the only platform exhibiting these problems, and this is all with the exact same code base, as it should be with a Java application.

This strongly points to a well architected program experiencing the limitations of the underlying Java implementation.