A shame

A shame

Posted Apr 8, 2005 15:10 UTC (Fri) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736)
In reply to: A shame by Xman
Parent article: GCJ - past, present, and future

My favorite thing about Java is just how safe and predictable it is. When I declare a member variable private, I know that nothing outside of that object will be messing with it, no matter what. No worries that some code someplace trying to copy a string will accidentally get a bad pointer and scribble randomly over my stuff.

Java's built-in threading control primitives and its ubiquitously thread-safe libraries are also great, as is RMI, the GC system, and its exceptions system.

There are a lot of things Java isn't good for (see John Carmack's recent comments on Java for some really good details there), but for a large class of programming problems Java is excellent.

Portability can be great as well, my Java server and client code runs just fine on Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux (x86, amd64, powerpc hosted on an AS/400 system), AIX, Solaris, and more, without any ifdef's or recompiles.

Yeah, there's a lot of things that would have been fixed many years ago if Sun were more open with the environment (I've had important bugs outstanding on Sun's Bug Database for 7 and 8 years, now), but you do wind up having to take the bad with the good, and the ubiquity and consistency of the platform is a notable good.

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