[1502] in java-interest
Re: Systems Programming Oriented Java
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John D. Ramsdell)
Wed Sep 6 10:02:43 1995
To: cmcmanis@scndprsn.Eng.Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Cc: java-interest@java.sun.com, ramsdell@linus.mitre.org
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 05 Sep 1995 09:44:41 PDT."
<9509051644.AA18047@pepper.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 1995 07:08:12 -0400
From: "John D. Ramsdell" <ramsdell@linus.mitre.org>
Okay, okay, so J was a bad name. Let's just call it SPOJ. The issue
is not supposed to be the name....
> As a C/Kernel hacker from the "early" Sun I share your mistrust of
> garbage collection systems, however we have some very bright folks
> (Bill Joy being one of them) who are convinced that GC based systems
> are as viable for OS work as the current alloc/free schemes. The
> assertion is that GC systems are reaching a level of maturity that
> optimizing compilers have, that is to say they do more of what you
> want and less of what you say. :-)
I not do share your mistrust of garbage collected systems. For
non-realtime systems, I think operating systems should provide and use
automatic storage reclamation. Read the Mach sources and tell me if
you think reference counting is a good idea. Even in time sensitive
applications, alloc/gc schemes may be superior to alloc/free schemes
when deadlines are not too strict. Unfortunately, the popular OS's of
the day do not provide automatic storage reclamation.
The key question is this: In what language should one write a garbage
collector? One answer is C. Another is SPOJ. A wrong answer is Java
because no one wants a garbage collector that uses another garbage
collector for its runtime system. The advantage of using SPOJ is that
most of the debugging of the garbage collector can be performed with a
Java runtime system, but when it is deployed, it uses a C-like runtime
system. I suspect soon there will be a very nice integrated program
development environment written in Java. SPOJ would make that
environment available to systems programmers.
John
-
Note to Sun employees: this is an EXTERNAL mailing list!
Info: send 'help' to java-interest-request@java.sun.com
