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Subject: Re: Java is for kiddies
From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
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Date: 28 Aug 2002 10:35:27 -0700

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 08:58, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote:
>
> C is more reliable than Java??


Both are reliable.  "Reliability" is more a function of the software
engineer.  I've written complicated mission-critical server software in
Java that will run without a hiccup as long as the Unix box it is
sitting on is running.  Same with C.  For processes that are running
months at a time, and in my case constantly touching databases and doing
lots of low-level network stuff, reliability is obtained by making sure
every conceivable problem (and problems you didn't conceive of) recovers
to a clean/safe process state so that things keep running i.e. it is a
design/programming issue.

That said, we usually prototype serious systems in Java and then
re-implement them in C if we have time.  Java doesn't scale well as a
language for server apps, though not for the reasons usually offered. 
The problem is that for high-end server apps, you really need fairly
detailed and low-level control of system resources to get around
bottlenecks that show up relatively quickly in languages that don't give
you access to it.  You can squeeze several times the performance out of
a C server program than a Java one simply by being able to finely tune
(or more frequently, bypass) the system resource management. 
Nonetheless, this is not a significant factor for most applications you
could conceivably develop in either language, as most aren't limited by
raw performance scalability.


-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com


