I usually play a game on my smartphone (2048 at this time) while it loads, and if not I make a cup of coffee (I'm a Coffee addict and proud of it) for me the load times is really surprising, I can load any GTA in less than 30 seconds, Watch Dogs in around 20 seconds, but Modded Minecraft can take up to 11 minutes, that's what I don't understand.
What you don't realize is that modded Minecraft is nothing but a hack applied to a kludge with a huge band-aid holding it together. This doesn't mean I dislike Modded, it just means I know enough about programming and the history of Java (I still have my O'Reilly Java 1.1 from 1997) to not worry when something actually works but takes a bit of time.
By way of an explanation, Java was first written in 1995 as one of the first "generic" interpreted languages. While this allows any Java program to run on any system with a "Java RE", the fact that it's universal code makes the runtime somewhat bloated. Add the fact that it's interpreted and you realize that you cannot optimize for speed very well.
In comparison, your "AAA" games are written in compiled languages for specific hardware with quality optimized APIs to squeeze every bit of speed out of the code. The only way to optimize further is to write in the CPU's native machine code using an assembler, at the cost of doubling or tripling development time, but the result will be a
much smaller program and usually run faster.
At this point in the hypothetical timeline we have Vanilla MC. There are many issues here that are slowly being fixed, such as the change in block-IDs between 1.6 and 1.7. When MC was first written it was not flow-charted or fully documented... It was a hobby project, after all. Bits were added/removed as new ideas were conceived and things became a headache to maintain. 200K+ line changes from 1.6 to 1.7 helped a bit but was just the tip of the iceberg. Add to that the new ideas that are being imported from other programs/languages and more changes are on the way, like the idea that you don't need to check the rendering for every block down to bedrock, just the ones in line-of-sight. That one came from MC Pocket Edition, written in C++ because phones and tablets don't have the resources to waste.
Now the Kludge: There are/were several "shim" programs to fake up an interface between MC and mods. The one we are most familiar with here is Forgecraft. These programs have to be changed every time MC is changed and cause part of the delay between a new version of MC and Modpacks for said version, and mod developers can't even begin to start their work until their "shim" is finished.
All mods are the "Hack" part of the above equation. Keep in mind that I'm old enough to remember calling a program a Hack was a compliment, before the media got hold of the word and defiled it... A Hack used to refer to a program that got hardware or other software to do something cool it wasn't originally designed to do, such as the first floating-point math routines running on integer CPUs, or self-modifying code. All mods fit that description to me.
BTW, Thumbs up on 2048
and Coffee, although I also play Scrolls at times
