I think there'll always be a need for native code, as there are some things you simply cannot do
with interpreted/JIT languages. For instance, I'm working on a WIN32 application in C++ which performs a low level analysis of a hard disk drive and displays the results in a dialog box. Whatever about Swing, the low-level stuff is nigh on impossible in most interpeted languages. You also have to remember that most of these languages provide a high level of abstraction over the actually hardware your programming, so it's impossible to gain an understanding of what your program is doing in memory and in CPU registers when EVERYTHING is shrouded in namespaces and classes provided by the language vendor. One option is to use a native interface like the JNI, but I used that when developing my disk application for Unix and it was fairly horrible.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there'll always be a need for native code, as there are some things you simply cannot do with interpreted/JIT languages. For instance, I'm working on a WIN32 application in C++ which performs a low level analysis of a hard disk drive and displays the results in a dialog box. Whatever about Swing, the low-level stuff is nigh on impossible in most interpeted languages. You also have to remember that most of these languages provide a high level of abstraction over the actually hardware your programming, so it's impossible to gain an understanding of what your program is doing in memory and in CPU registers when EVERYTHING is shrouded in namespaces and classes provided by the language vendor. One option is to use a native interface like the JNI, but I used that when developing my disk application for Unix and it was fairly horrible.