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1996-05-01 - Re: The Joy of Java

Header Data

From: Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>
To: perry@piermont.com
Message Hash: 7bdbace060d096d6993c7e795d0f51aaafd3f461dce2d2eef2fe1e5e43e413a6
Message ID: <199604301749.NAA11738@universe.digex.net>
Reply To: <199604292245.SAA10827@jekyll.piermont.com>
UTC Datetime: 1996-05-01 04:03:35 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 12:03:35 +0800

Raw message

From: Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>
Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 12:03:35 +0800
To: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: The Joy of Java
In-Reply-To: <199604292245.SAA10827@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <199604301749.NAA11738@universe.digex.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


"Perry E. Metzger" writes:
>Scott Brickner writes:
>> 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.
>
>Java applications can't save files to disk or use data files on
>disk. If you were, for instance, buying two CPU weeks of idle time on
>some machines, you would need stuff like checkpointing or the ability
>to save intermediate results.

It is false that Java applications "can't" save files to disk.  Java
has no I/O facilities, exactly like C and C++ have none.  Any I/O
capability must be provided in external functions.  The applet
environment doesn't include file I/O functions, but it can be easily
added in a reasonably safe way (filesystem object only allocates a fixed
region of real disk space, applets are charged to use it, after the
"rent" is gone, the blocks are freed, etc.)

Java applications may also send checkpoint data or intermediate results
back "home", even in the current environment.

Thread