Object-oriented design patterns in the kernel, part 1

Posted Jun 2, 2011 21:46 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: Object-oriented design patterns in the kernel, part 1 by juliank
Parent article: Object-oriented design patterns in the kernel, part 1

> The language coming closest to the optimum is Vala. Private fields are not
> part of an objects ABI, neither is (for callees) whether a method is
> virtual or not.

I'm pretty sure private fields are not part of the ABI in Java, either. Your jar files will continue to work when someone changes private fields in a different jar. It's a nice feature and a lot of modern programming languages have it.

And as you noted, C has it as well. Private stuff stays private in C (as opposed to C++.)

Object-oriented design patterns in the kernel, part 1

Posted Jun 2, 2011 23:45 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Java has very loose ABI. It's possible to add new public methods without breaking it or even modify existing methods to some degree.

There's a nice description here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Evolving_Java-based_APIs_2

The fact that Java bytecode is essentially a lightly-parsed source code helps immensely.

Object-oriented design patterns in the kernel, part 1

Posted Jun 8, 2011 19:22 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Linking at start time makes Java very flexible indeed. It is also what makes every Java program insanely slow to start up.

You cannot have your cake and eat it.