In general, Java has developed into a fairly nifty language, with a good execution speed. However, some operations are still disappointing in comparison to other languages…
I have been investigating a PDF file to see why it is slow on our PDF renderer. Running it in my favourite Java Profiler showed that it spent a lot of time in the setClip command, even though I was setting the clip to a simple Rectangle. I can understand a hit on a complex shape but not a simple Shape. Optimising the code to reduce calls to setClip() has speeded up that PDF file by an order of magnitude.
So I am now working though my code to ensure that I call setClip() very sparingly. Are there any Java language features which you find annoyingly slow?
