Re: Air traffic control system in Java

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

On 3/3/2011 4:13 PM, Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
> Hyman Rosen wrote:
>
>> <http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2011/03/02/air-traffic-control-system-is-not-safe-say-uk-controllers-40091970/>
>>
>> And the arguments about it are flying through the air
>> as fast as the planes :-)
>
> WTF!? Isn't air traffic control supposed to be a real-time task? And they do
> it in _Java_?

Well, here's a paper by IBM that's ten years old,
<http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/papers/Bacon01Java.pdf>,
     Java without the Coffee Breaks:
     A Nonintrusive Multiprocessor Garbage Collector

     In this paper we present a new multiprocessor garbage collector
     that achieves maximum measured pause times of 2.6 milliseconds
     over a set of eleven benchmark programs that perform significant
     amounts of memory allocation.

Mocking programming languages based on feelings rather than research
doesn't lead to happy results. Like not using Ada because it was
designed by a committee for the military and it's slow because of all
the checking it does.