Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] Java is fun!

[Dustin Sallings]

On Wednesday, Oct 22, 2003, at 15:22 US/Pacific, Tom Lord wrote:

> > I think there are lessons to be learned here for everyone.  Some
> > things may not work quite as well as some people expect in certain
> > cases, nor as poorly as others expect.  I still believe that the
> > failures that have been cited so far will, at worst,
>
> I think you really want to say not "at worst" but "in most cases", and
> that's a very important difference.

	You are probably correct.  I am occasionally surprised at the mistakes 
people can make.

> > provide misleading
> > error messages when a failure occurs rather than causing the types of
> > problems we've seen in various persistent applications written in C
> > over the years.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "persistent application" in this
> context, or why you think that mention of C is anything other than an
> Apples-to-Oranges kind of comparison.

	I'm referring to C's ability to have data and code get mixed up such 
that bad data can insert instructions into the program.  I guess 
persistence has nothing to do with this as the same types of problems 
have occurred with services fired off of inetd as well.

	The point is, I don't expect to see bugs in java applications 
providing remote shells or other unexpected paths of execution remotely.

> Supposing that you might mean something like:
>
>         "The dollar cost of bugs in programs written in C dwarfs the
>          dollar cost of bugs relating to this weakness in Java's
>          exception mechanisms."
>
> my reply is:  Java is relatively young.  Give it time to mature.

	I'm not necessarily disagreeing here.  There will likely be a new 
class of bugs that spring up at some point.

	I guess the nice summary point is that I find it easier to write 
reliable code in Java than in some other popular languages.  That puts 
java in a relative position to some other languages for a certain 
category of tasks in my opinion.  Java is not my favorite language to 
work in, but it doesn't bother me that much most of the time.

--
Dustin Sallings