Friday October 14, 2005

As I suffered through the n^th application crash of the day, I couldn't help thinking of my favorite underappreciated Java feature: fault containment. Between try{}catch and the tight memory model, failures tend to happen close to where the error is, and they can be caught with a very good chance that there has been no corruption of neighbouring data structures. So if you're using some sort of editor and one of the commands has a bug in it, if it's written in Java you usually get a little pop-up box that says something like "error in command", and you can carry on working. In C apps, one bad pointer and you're blown out of the water, with all of your editing lost. This is particularly bad in systems that use plugins where the amount of QA is variable. A lot of what motivated the tight memory model was me having wasted too much of my life tracking down weird exotic memory smashes, and vowing to never have to waste time on stuff like that again.