Tuesday, March 19, 2002

Brewing Conflict Gosling: "The Java Virtual Machine supports many different languages. Most of the commercial Ada compilers target JVM, and many defense projects use that. We support all kinds of languages—but we don't say that we're willing to support all languages. That [selective support] has to do with issues of what you can prove, from a security point of view. There are good reasons not to try to support C and C++. Supporting them drives you to support unrestricted pointer operations. The security story goes out the window; the reliability story is trashed as well, and that backs you into the security problem from another direction."... "The other complaint is that the Java Community Process is slow. I've evolved a standard reply: Democracies do work more slowly than dictatorships, but over the centuries, societies have decided that the price is well paid."

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