Re: Possible to write compiler to Java VM?

Henry Baker (hbaker@netcom.com) wrote:


: However, the single most important reason why Java is a _much_ better
: language than Ada-95 is the fact that Java does garbage collection and
: Ada does not.


Actually, AdaMagic/Java does use garbage collection. The Ada 95
standard does not mandate garbage collection, but it does allow it.
And the AdaMagic/Java implementation takes advantage of that
allowance.


Probably even the Java standard, were it to exist, could not easily
mandate any particular kind of garbage collection. In this sense, Ada
95 and Java would be similar. The difference is that there exists a
reference Java implementation that provides reasonable garbage
collection (albeit probably not acceptable for real-time
applications), and garbage collection is presumed to exist by Java
programmers.


Until the real-time and safety-critical community embraces garbage
collection, Ada clearly must support "manual" storage management. I
might believe that their concerns about garbage collection are not
"technically defensible," but that doesn't change the fact of their
concerns. Ada 83 tried to impose a particular task synchronization
model on the real-time community (rendezvous), and never convinced a
large portion of them. To try to impose the garbage-collection model
of storage management at this stage on the same community would be a
similarly doomed effort.


Perhaps in 200x, with a decade of experience with implementations like
AdaMagic/Java, Java itself, concurrent Eiffel (presuming it becomes
widely available), Modula-3, etc., which attempt to address real-time
programming while providing garbage collection, it will be feasible to
banish support for manual storage management. But only time will
tell.


--
-Tucker Taft stt@inmet.com http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
Intermetrics, Inc. Cambridge, MA USA
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