Re: The Joy of Java

[Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>]

"Perry E. Metzger" writes:
>You can do that safely without making it dangerous for your machine. I
>know how I would build a restricted execution environment for such
>markets. However, Java is 1) too slow, since if you are selling
>rendering cycles or such you don't want to be running an interpreter,
>2) insufficently safe, and 3) paradoxically, insufficiently powerful
>for the sort of code you would want to run in such an environment.

The speed can be significantly addressed by compiling the byte-code to
local machine instructions, but given the sheer number of junk cycles
that are made available by letting a Java interpreter sell them, it
doesn't much matter for some applications.

I agree that Java is currently too unsafe.  The current Java model may
not even be salvageable (that being where I got in on this thread).
It's the concept embodied by Java (and it's many conceptual cousins,
Scheme, Safe-TCL, E, etc.) that I was talking about.

I don't understand what you mean by "insufficiently powerful".  It's as
expressively powerful as most high-level languages, and computationally
Turing equivalent.  It's lack of power seems entirely in the performance
arena, which may be solved, eventually.