Sun's own engineers find Java "impractical"

AN INSIDER AT Sun Microsystems says there's frantic discussion inside the company about big problems with the Java platform that, he claimed, "prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun".

He said: "It strikes me as hypocritical for Sun to blame Microsoft for any failure of the Java platform when Sun's own engineers find developing common software applications in Java impractical".

One of the problems, he claimed, is that while Java has a lot of benefits compared to C and C++, its implementation on Solaris makes it difficult to deliver reliable applications.

Sun engineers think that Solaris gets in the way of implementing many software applications. The problem is widely recognised internally.

The insider claimed one of the problems was that a large number of bugs in Java end up being labelled unfixable compared to a much smaller number for C++.

One problem is that every Java program relies on the installed Java Runtime Environment, and when packages are issued every four or five months, they destroy existing packages and can't be back-graded to the prior install.

The memory footprint on Solaris machines is rather large, it appears.

The problem is worse than this because it means that programmers write apps for one release of Java but may find future releases kybosh the software.

This is why one reason why there aren't shelves full of shrink wrapped packages for Windows and Linux, with Java still widely seen as a language for the Web.

Sun should instead, introduce backward compatibility for these upgrades and also have a patch system.

He said another problem is with the size of the JRE which can in some case hog huge amounts of memory. That needs to be fixed by as much as 80 per cent or so.

Questions being asked by customers include why Sun systems using Solaris and Java hog so much memory. µ