Re: real-time Java

[xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan)]

"Dr. Michael Paus" <paus@ib-paus.com> wrote:
> Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

>> How the heck you do [hard real time
>> execution] with a language subject to
>> garbage collection is going to be an
>> interesting thing to watch happen.
>> Some complaints in
>> comp.lang.java.programmer mention
>> Java going off to stew for whole
>> minutes at a time.

> If you are interested in how this can
> be achieved, have a look at
> http://www.aicas.com/

Thanks for that. Their software would
probably achieve faster acceptance if
the book convincing people it was
possible at all were freely available
online, but I cannot make their business
decisions for them, and my viewpoint may
be biased by poverty.

> Nevertheless the statement that Java
> stops for minutes to do some garbage
> collection is simply wrong for modern
> VMs.

I'm not quite sure how you can
categorize as "wrong" the experiences
reported by many programmers.

What they are reporting certainly
_happens_.

Whether what they are reporting is due
to the conceptual difficulty of
programming for a garbage collecting
language implementation,

  [GC, it should be emphasized, was
  created mostly to overcome the
  conceptual difficulty of programming
  with explict new/dispose commands, and
  if conceptual difficulty is still the
  main problem, then garbage collection
  is not yet a programming tool which
  satisfies its design goal.]

or whether what they are reporting is
due to inherent limitations of garbage
collection technology today as a
mechanism, or whether what they are
reporting is the result of flawed GC
implementations today, the problem still
certainly exists.

Solving it in all three forms needs to
be a priority issue for Java Virtual
Machine implementors, Java language
design mavins, and Java tutorial
writers, since GC problems are one of
the most frequent causes of criticisms
of Java and slowness of Java programming
language acceptance.

xanthian.