The Former Weblog of Peter Ahé

Today is my last day at Sun. This has been a tremendous experience, and you, the readers of my blog, have helped make it so. I plan to follow the OpenJDK compiler, Kitchen Sink Language, and OpenJFX projects, but I have a full time job, so my contributions will be small.

I still have a lot to say about Java technology, and I hope I will be able to say a bit about my next project. I invite you to follow me to my new place on the web.

There is a workshop on IDE and restructuring tools at ECOOP this year. I figured this would be of interest to some of you reading my blog. For more information, visit the EPRIDE 2007 wiki.

URLs should be nice and easy to read and remember (see URL as UI). Here is a tip for doing that in Apache Roller, the blog software used on blogs.sun.com: before you save your blog entry the first time, provide a short title of the entry that will look good in the URL. Then save the first draft and Roller will pick the title for the permalink. Now you can change the title to what ever you feel is right but the nice URL will remain.

Thanks to Randall Munroe for generously sharing his comics with the rest of the world.

Most of Silicon Valley is very spacious and I never have to parallel park, so I forget how to do it which is very inconvenient when I do go to the city. So I was happy to find a parallel park simulator.

Gilad has decided to move on.

Jon from the compiler team has started a blog. Not much stuff there yet but I have a feeling that you will see some interesting stuff there very soon now.

Herr Helfert sent me a question asking me if I can recommend any good books on compiler design or implementation.

He already mentioned the Dragon Book which is a must.

I also understand that Appel's Modern Compiler Implementation series is popular but I have never read them myself. The C version looked a bit thin compared to the Dragon Book (but some may argue that one has too much detail).

That's about all the books I know on compilers. If you're interested in compilers, I would also recommend that you contact your local university or college. Many univerities work with tech companies to offer some form of training.

A book that is not really about compilers but that I have found really useful is the GOF book on Design Patterns. I cannot live without Visitor(331).

If you are interested in Java™ programming language compilers or the like, the puzzlers book by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter has a number of interesting comments for language designers.

I like books on general software engineering best practices and can especially recommend:

• The Practice of Programming By Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master By Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
• Effective Java By Joshua Bloch

Finally, don't forget to read the mirror paper by Gilad Bracha and David Ungar.

Back from vacation: read on for an update on the compiler [Read More]

I guess JavaOne had an impact after all
There are no compiler related fixes in b87. Stay tuned for b89.

Unfortunately, something went wrong in a merge and a few fixes were lost (it has been corrected). This means that the change from -target 6 to -target 5 missed b83. However, Joe managed to get an updated version of JSR 269 API added to b83 after our normal dead-line. I'll mention these changes when I blog about b85. Just to be clear: it wasn't Joe that accidentally deleted the -target change.

This should demonstrate the value of writing tests for even the most trivial of changes. Did somebody recently mention something about testing...? ;-)

Boy, have I been around lately. After returning from Japan, I went to India. India was great, I really like the people and the culture. After having been "home" in California for just a week I flew to Denmark to celebrate Xmas with friends and family in the "old country". I have spend a few weeks in Denmark and am currently in Prague in the Czech Republic.

I took a few pictures while in India, here is one of Seetharam and I. Seetharam tests the compiler and other stuff.

I did find a workable power solution but didn't really get much time to blog about Japan. I'm returning to the Bay Area and leave you with this picture from the mote behind the hotel. I'll upload my talk when I get back.

At lunch today, Joe told a funny story about penguins.

Gilad has created a weblog. Not much yet but it should be exciting to see what's he's up to: Computational Theology.

Several years ago I wrote a guide for submitting error reports to the Systems Staff back at my University in Denmark. The problem seems to be universal, so I think I will repeat the important elements of a good error report:

• What did you want to do?
• What did you do?
• What happened?
• What did you expect?
• Don't diagnose the problem, stick to reporting.
• Have you included all relevant information so that the problem can be verified and/or reproduced?

Here are some examples of bad error reports:

From an email: I can't read email.

Since the user didn't include any additional contact information, it was quite hard to help him. His email account looked fine and sending an email asking for more information seemed pointless.

My program doesn't compile

Strictly speaking, your program probably shouldn't compile. That's the job of the compiler. ;-) If the compiler rejects your program, you should provide enough information to reproduce the error message. In most cases, this means include the source code of your program and include the error message you saw.

is just getting too silly.

This is the weblog of Peter von der Ahé (Peter Ahé for short), a recent addition to the J2SE team. I primarily work on javac (especially the type system).

My intention of this blog is to post answers to frequently asked questions about the new features added to the Java Programming Language in Tiger.