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Comment by naoqj | Hacker News Reader

A bittorrent client is a cpu-intensive application... why would I want to use a java application for this?!

You're missing the second half of your reasoning here. Why would Java applications be unsuitable for something CPU intensive? It matters more how you build your program than what technology you use, as long as you use the right data structures and algorithms, Java is as suitable for CPU intensive tasks as any other language.

For what it's worth, a BitTorrent client will (usually) be more limited by network and disk I/O than by your CPU, as those tend to be the bottleneck when it comes to transferring large amount of data/large amount of small packets (DHT).

One of the best ever BT clients was Azureus (later Vuze), and it was indeed a Java app. It hammered the disk like it was nobody else's business.

Bigly is actually a vuze fork

I remember back in Kazaa/LimeWire/WinMX day, Azureus was a powerful beastly BT client. It is a massive beast that took my computer to fully load Azureus in 10 minutes. And that was the only powerful BT client at the time and people hate it because it is powerful but it is CPU intensive. BitComet, BitLord, FlashGet couldn't hold a candle against Azureus. Until qBittorrent, uTorrent and Transmission popped up few years after Azureus initial release. What a time to be alive back then.

The great thing with Azureus is if you could download bits of content somewhere else you could copy them in and it would take that into account.

This was quite handy for a big torrent of music videos back in the day with not enough seeders.

Could it be that only the UI is in Java? I’m on mobile, I did not check sources, but that would be reasonable.

It's mostly Java, GitHub reports 99.1% of the source is Java, with tiny sprinkles of C++ (0.5%), C (0.2%), Objective-C++ (0.1%) and Objective-C (0.1%).

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