There's a new update available to Apple ADC members (through a free registration online on their website) that fixes numerous regression bugs found in the current release of Java 1.4.2_01 for Mac OSX.

It was advertized by Apple on its ADC News Letter #414:

The release note for this version is not very verbose. But ADC members may consult the various bugs listed and corrected listed in the Apple Bug Database. This new "Final Candidate" version should show these version strings when running "java -version" from a console window:
For now, Apple will probably not publish any 1.5 version before Sun releases a final version of Java 1.5, code-named "Tiger" (for Windows and Linux) with all its support documents.

The main interest of Java 1.5 on Windows is that it's the first version that integrates a part of the previously Apple-specific code sharing between VMs, at least for the Client VM (the Sun Server VM currently still does not share the core library instances, and I won't recommand it for production as it still has various bugs/limitation that greatly impact the performance of perfectly legal Java classes; the main perfromance issues in Sun Java 1.5 Server VM is with the runtime HotSpot JIT compiler, which fails to compile the bytecode into native code, due to too strict limitations which are hardcoded with fixed-size static structures for method calls; Sun apparently does not want to change this, although this is a regression of something that worked in Java 1.4 Server and Client VM, or even in the Java 1.5 Client VM); it is apparently too late for the newcoming official release of Java 1.5 on Windows and Linux.

So the performance benefit of Java 1.5 on Windows will probably not be as effective on MacOSX where some of the new features of Sun Java 1.5 are natively supported in the Apple's port of Java 1.4 for MacOSX.

I think that Apple will need to make its own tuning for the Client and Server VM on MacOSX before releasing Java 1.5, as Sun does not support the HotSpot JIT compiler on MacOSX or on other PowerPC-based systems (Both Apple and IBM are concerned, as well as those using Linux/PowerPC).

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